Technology – Page 11 – Into the Woods

Keeping an eye on the FCC

President Roosevelt prepares for a fireside chat.

A couple of days ago, I posted an item on the importance of keeping an eye on the FCC. The item was focused on the future of over-the-air television, which may not affect your world very much. Still, we all need to keep an eye on the FCC, because decisions made by the FCC are critical to the future of the media, the future of the Internet, the choices we have, and what we pay.

A friend of mine who teaches communications law commented on that post. So that his information doesn’t get lost in a comment, I’m reposting it here.

The libertarians’ absolutist argument against regulation in the communications sector is silly on three particularly ironic points:

1) We already have a largely unregulated system thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which loosened or erased many longstanding rules, particularly those guarding against monopoly ownership. Among other things, the Act led to an almost overnight consolidation of the radio industry whereby a company like Clear Channel could grow from 60 to 1,200 stations in 18 months. The first order of business in that nationwide takeover was the elimination or decimation of local news staffing at all of those stations.

2) The media and telecom giants, from Time-Warner Cable to Disney, long ago captured the regulatory agencies, along with Congress and state legislatures, and openly and brazenly manipulate the rules they are supposed to live by. Furthermore, the FCC often doesn’t even enforce its own rules, making them meaningless. Just one example here: The FCC has allowed Rupert Murdoch to get around the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban by granting him a waiver year after year; thus, he can control newspapers, television stations and radio stations all in the same market (New York, for one).

3) Media companies WANT there to be rules because the rules help them operate in a necessarily structured and predictable environment, and because, more often than not these days, the rules favor their interests against those of the public. The ban on municipal broadband in North Carolina is a prime example, but industry-friendly — indeed, industry-written — rules stretch to the FCC and the Justice Department, which, for example, is sure to rubber-stamp a merger between Comcast and Time-Warner Cable if the two companies decide to go ahead with it. It would create a monopoly that would control the television and Internet services of about 50 percent of the American population.

There are other reasons that the libertarian dream of a no-rules-at-all utopia is stupid, but those three suffice. I suppose the fundamental point to make is that their position is ahistorical. It is detached from both the technical and legal history of the communications sector. When the federal government first started regulating radio in 1927, it was because the radio owners themselves were screaming FOR regulation — someone to police the wild, wild west of their new industry and sort out the chaos of too many stations chasing too few frequencies. Regulating the technical aspects of radio was at the center of the FCC’s mandate when it was created by the Communications Act of 1934, and it remains a vital part of the agency’s mission today.

An example particular to Acorn Abbey: The only way there will ever be high-speed Internet service in such a rural locale will be through the use of so-called “super wifi,” which harnesses unused “white space” on the “gold-plated spectrum” that television stations enjoy. It can travel for miles and penetrate buildings just like a TV signal. There are even experiments under way to see if television transmitters can be altered so that they also can transmit Internet traffic. It would solve the rural broadband build-out problem overnight because the infrastructure is already in place.

Of course, the same companies that routinely decry regulation of any kind, the likes of Comcast and Time-Warner, will do anything they can to manipulate the rules to prevent the above scenario from happening. And they will try to manipulate the rules at the federal, state and county levels to stop any new efforts to break their monopoly control. And once again, the problem will not be that we have regulations. The problem will be that we have regulations written to benefit the regulated, not us.

For background on the Radio Act of 1927:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Act_of_1927#The_Radio_Act_of_1927

For background on the Communication Act of 1934:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_act_of_1934

For background on the Telecommunications Act of 1996:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Sousveillance?

Source: Stephanie Mann, age 6, via Wikipedia

Periodically I check out the web site of David Brin, a science fiction writer and futurist, to see what’s on his mind. Brin is the author of the brilliant and classic Startide Rising (1983), which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards the year it was published. But, smart as Brin is, I find that I usually disagree with him. This is because I put him in the unpleasant category of techno-utopians — people who think that technology will solve all our problems, including our energy problems and even our political problems. I think that is bunk, and dangerous bunk.

Brin had linked to a piece he wrote in “The European” in which he argues that the solution to growing surveillance and invasion of privacy is “sousveillance.” The word “sousveillance” is a made-up word and is the opposite of surveillance. It means spying up at elites the same way they spy down on us. The prefix “sur” of course comes from a French word meaning over, or above; and “sous” is another French word meaning under, or beneath.

This notion that sousveillance is an effective antidote to surveillance seems to me to be so obviously silly that I’m inclined to think that the techno-utopians are even more deluded than I had thought. Just give everyone a Google glass and we’ll fix the world’s surveillance problem!

First of all, there is a straw man fallacy: “… [F]or the illusory fantasy of absolute privacy has to come to an end.” Who said anything about absolute privacy? There has never been such a thing as absolute privacy in American society or American law. The law and the Constitution are almost silent on the issue of privacy. But there have been lots of lawsuits having to do with privacy, and as far as the courts are concerned the issue is pretty settled.

But the second and biggest point of silliness is the notion that we small people have the same power to spy on elites that they have to spy on us. Yes, sometimes it happens. The photo of the cop pepper-spraying a group of already restrained protesters held our national attention for weeks. That was a fine example of sousveillance — someone had a camera ready at the right time. Another brilliant lick of sousveillance was when a waiter (or someone) at a Romney fund-raising event for rich people secretly made a tape of Romney trashing 47 percent of the American people as “takers.” It helped expose Romney as a servant of the rich, and it helped him lose the election.

Edward Snowden’s spying on the spies, then releasing the evidence to the media and to Wikileaks, is the all-time best example of sousveillance. Because of the actions of one very clever nerd, the elites caught red-handed are still squawking and trying to lie their way out it. We got some very useful information on how elites’ surveillance systems operate, though that information will soon enough be obsolete.

But as brilliant as these coups of sousveillance were, such things are always going to be rare and accidental. That is because elites have systems for secrecy that we little people will never have. They are rich, they are ruthless, and they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars (most of it our own tax money) to build walls of secrecy around themselves while monitoring everything we do. The idea that the little cameras in our phones, or built into our glasses, can fix this is seriously dumb. Nevertheless, we need to always keep our cameras handy, and we must be creative in coming up with new ways to spy on elites.

Dumb cop: Nailed by the camera!

Dumb politician: Nailed by the camera!

The future of over-the-air television

Hugh Jackman in “Oklahoma,” broadcast yesterday on WUNC-TV

One of my regular themes on this blog is beating down the misconception that digital technologies have made radio obsolete. The opposite is true. Digital technologies have made radio more important than ever. I am, of course, using the broad definition of radio — the wireless transmission of information using the electromagnetic spectrum. Your WIFI router, your cell phone, your car keys — all of them contain radio apparatus, and they all use some part or other of the electromagnetic radio spectrum. By this definition, even television is radio. It’s just that the radio signal used by television is modulated in such a way that it can create an image.

The important thing to know here is that there is only so much radio spectrum, and that there is not enough of it. The only way to manage this limited resource is to regulate the living daylights out of it, and to manage the spectrum wisely and frugally and in the public interest, because radio spectrum is a publicly owned natural resource. That’s what the FCC is for.

Most people get their television these days by connecting to cable or satellite. But about 10 percent of Americans — including me — either can’t or won’t pay the high cost of cable or satellite and get television over the air, through an antenna. This is on my mind right now because I finally was able to find a low-cost antenna ($40), that when placed in my attic and pointed toward Sauratown Mountain can pick up the nearest PBS television station. Up until now, the abbey’s rarely used television (except for watching DVD’s and Blu-ray) has not been able to receive PBS.

I’m not going to get too nerdy on this point, but because I have a strong interest in radio communications and because I have an Extra class amateur radio license, I’m very familiar with radio spectrum and how radio waves propagate differently according to their frequency. Most people, of course, don’t care in the least what frequency their cell phone is using. But we nerds care, and given a particular device we probably can tell you pretty precisely what frequency or “band” it is using. Depending on who your carrier is and whether we’re talking about voice or data, your cell phone is using UHF frequencies between 800 Mhz up to about 2500 Mhz.

The UHF television channels (channel 14 through 69) range from about 470 Mhz to 800 Mhz. This is very valuable radio spectrum, and big players like Verizon want as much of it as they can get. There is no plan at present, as far as I know, to completely toss out broadcast television. But the FCC is working on taking back television spectrum and freeing it up for wireless data.

This is not a bad idea, though I’m always wary when so much money and corporate intrigue are involved. Because radio waves of different frequencies propagate differently, there are some advantages to television vs. cellular frequencies. The lower television frequencies penetrate buildings better and can travel farther. Cellular towers wouldn’t have to be so close together. But because the frequencies are lower, antennas also need to be longer to be efficient. Television frequencies are ideal for devices that are in a fixed location with a larger antenna — for example, in your attic rather than in your pocket. That’s why television ended up on those frequencies in the first place — wisdom and technical savvy exercised years ago by the FCC.

I mentioned that the PBS station nearest to me is on Sauratown Mountain, about 18 miles away. The right technology sitting on that mountain, using television frequencies, would be ideal for finally getting true broadband into a bandwidth-deprived rural home like mine.

Will it happen? First the FCC has to get it right. Then someone has to step in and build the infrastructure. Personally I would like to see a publicly owned, nonprofit system using this spectrum and providing broadband to rural homes and businesses at a reasonable cost. But corporations hate this idea, because the few publicly owned broadband systems in the country are delivering data much faster and cheaper. In North Carolina, corporations even lobbied for, and got, a state law that all but eliminates competition from publicly owned systems. And yes I’m still angry about this, because it shows how easily politicians can be corrupted into serving profit rather than the public interest.

Our job is to keep a close eye on what the FCC is doing and make sure that the public interest is served. Most people don’t realize that the radio spectrum is owned by the public. It is a natural resource, and it is scarce and limited. That’s why it can’t be used without a license, and that’s why it must be closely regulated to prevent misuse and interference. If we don’t keep an eye on the FCC, they’re all the more likely to sell out to profit and betray the public interest. Yes, we “auction” radio spectrum and permit it to be used for profit, but that right always comes with a license and strict terms. There’s always a way of taking the spectrum back if the terms of the license are violated. The radio spectrum ultimately does not belong to Verizon or to any other corporation. It belongs to us.

Now back to PBS for a moment. One of the needs that PBS ought to be serving is keeping the public aware of issues like this. Lord knows the local news won’t. But as far as I can tell, WUNC-TV — North Carolina’s public television system — is letting down on the job. Of course, their budget has been blown apart by the current regime in Raleigh, which I believe prefers that the public be kept in the dark. It appears to me that most of WUNC-TV’s state-produced programming has been heavily featurized and dumbed down. One of this blog’s regular readers is an academic who specializes in this area, so maybe he can comment on the current state of WUNC-TV’s public affairs programming.

An afterword about why regulation is not a violation of individual rights but is absolutely critical: Anyone who holds an amateur radio license is aware of the terms of that license and what kind of violations would cause the FCC to revoke the license. If I tried to use my license to broadcast, as opposed to talking to one other station, I would lose my license. If I repeatedly tried to use the ham bands for political speech or profanity, I would lose my license. If I accepted money for anything I transmitted on the ham bands, I would lose my license. If I got caught even once transmitting on a frequency that I am not authorized to use, I would lose my license. (Try transmitting on a frequency used for law enforcement and see how fast the FCC hunts you down and throws the book at you). If I interfere with another ham radio operator’s lawful rightful to use our frequencies according to the legal terms under which we share those frequencies, I would lose my license. If the use of the radio spectrum was not closely regulated, all your devices that depend on radio, including your GPS device, your cell phone, and the navigation systems of the airplane you’re on, would become unreliable, because there would be no legal means of preventing interference and abuse. I can’t resist getting in the occasional dig at “libertarians.” Mostly, they’re crazy.

Fire tower — like a lighthouse in the woods

I have long been fascinated by fire towers. Like lighthouses, they appeal to introverts because of their isolation and because they are found in appealing places — beside a coast, or in a forest. They have all the magic of promontories. Plus, fire towers have a certain nerdy appeal, because of the observation and communications apparatus that they contain.

It happens that, in Fugue in Ursa Major, I use a fire tower as a setting. When writing the descriptions of the fire tower, I had to rely on research. But on a recent trip to the North Carolina coast, I had a chance to examine this fire tower up close and verify that my descriptions of the fire tower were accurate.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on fire towers, also called lookout towers. They vary in height, but the tallest one in the United States is 175 feet.

The cabin

The landing

One of the eight landings on the way up

Empathy for mechanical things

A small area of the interior of my 1954 Collins 75A-4 receiver, which has 22 tubes and lots of rotating shafts attached to its inductors and condensers

It is universally understood that human beings — at least the better sort of human beings — have empathy for other human beings, and for animals. But empathy goes way beyond that. It took me a while to figure out the difference between people with green thumbs and people with black thumbs. I concluded that people with green thumbs have a highly developed empathy for plants. They have learned what plants want. If plants are happy, they feel their happiness. If plants are unhappy, they feel their pain and can’t rest until they figure out what the plant needs to be happy again.

It’s the same with mechanical things, and with electronic things. I have an almost debilitating empathy for mechanical things. Partly, I think, it’s because I’ve been a tinkerer ever since I was a little boy. I grew up in a culture in which boys learned how to use tools and learned how to fix things, things like cars. I did not wreck my toys. Some of my favorite toys, such as a train transformer that I used as a power supply for electrical experiments, lasted for years and years. I would even take it apart periodically and oil its rheostat.

I have a painful awareness of when something mechanical is stressed and is in danger of breaking. Anyone who has been around the abbey for very long knows that I have a seemingly neurotic complex about not slamming doors. Now partly this is because the sound of a door slamming is one of the rudest, most irritating sounds I know. But partly it’s because the abbey’s doors are excessively expensive and complicated, and from the day I moved into the abbey I’ve had premonitions of a door’s latch mechanism breaking, knowing how difficult and expensive it would be to get it fixed. Sure enough, one of the door’s latch mechanisms broke. I described the problem on the phone to a master locksmith, and he empathized with my empathy, warning me how difficult it is to repair one of those fancy German locking mechanisms in a door which has not one bolt but three (tighter weather seal and harder to knock down), not to mention a deadbolt and a special anti-slam finger that tells the mechanism whether the door is open or not, to guard against the bolts shearing if some idiot slams the door while the bolts are extended. Now, I know that not one in a hundred readers understood the mechanics in the previous sentence, but I wrote it anyway as an empathy-raising exercise.

Months before the windshield in my Jeep developed a creeping crack, I had a premonition of it. I swear I felt its stress developing. Two weeks ago, my dishwasher started leaking. I’d had a premonition of that too and had started thinking about what sort of replacement would be best.

When you give a machine a home, it’s like adopting an animal. You take on a commitment to feel that machine’s happiness or pain, and to take care of it. My Jeep needs washing, but it’s impeccably maintained. My god-awful complicated Rodgers 730 organ, now 21 years old, also is impeccably maintained. There’s not so much as a burned-out piston lamp. My IBM Self-Correcting Selectric III typewriter is in excellent working condition.

I don’t have a perfect record. A few weeks ago, I forgot to cover the lawn mower, and rain water got into the fuel tank. Horrible! Some of the garden tools are outdoors instead of in the basement where they belong. My Yaesu FT-897 transceiver could use some work. Boxing it up and sending it back to Yaesu’s excellent repair department is not a priority at the moment, but I feel its pain. And I am absolutely terrible with house plants, which is why I don’t have any and have stopped letting people give them to me.

To be surrounded by things that are broken ought to be a source of misery, similar to the misery of hungry chickens that are late to be fed, or lettuce that is wilting from lack of water.

The local garage that maintains my Jeep has a classic Fifties-vintage Rolls-Royce in storage. Every time I take the Jeep in, I sneak out to the Rolls-Royce, open the driver’s door, then gently close it again, just to hear the sound of its beautifully machined latching mechanism. But every latch, and every machine, especially the lame and the humble and the elderly, deserve our empathy, our respect, and our repairs in their time of need.

Smart car: A one-year re-review

I’ve had my 2013 Smart car for just over a year. It has exceeded all my expectations, and I stand by my original review from July 2012. There are a few things I can add after a year with the car.

As I expected, the Smart car’s gas mileage has gradually increased as the engine has gotten broken in. I now average about 51.5 miles per gallon. My mileage is greater than the Smart car’s EPA rating, and it’s greater than what most Smart car owners report. In fact, I hold the gas mileage record of all the 2013 Smart cars listed at Fuelly.com. I believe this is because I do a minimum of city driving (though a tank of gas will always include a couple of trips to shop in Winston-Salem); my lifestyle doesn’t require that I drive on freeways at criminal, gas-guzzling speeds; I have learned how to use (and like) the odd transmission in the Smart car; and I know how to drive.

When the time came for the 1-year service, I was afraid the cost would be high, since the Smart car is made by Mercedes. But actually the 1-year service cost only $220, about half of what I feared. Also, I find Mercedes dealerships much easier to deal with than other car dealerships, because there is much less of a sleaze factor. The salesmen and service managers seem to be overqualified, overeducated guys who ended up at a car dealership in a rotten economy.

In the last year, I have had no problems with the Smart car. I’ve had some fuel problems, but that’s not the car’s fault. Nothing on the car has broken. There was not a single thing, even a little thing, that needed to be fixed at the 1-year service.

About the fuel problem. It first occurred after I’d had the car for a few weeks. Shortly after I started it up one morning, the car started misfiring, and eventually the check-engine light came on. I drove straight to the Mercedes dealership. They could find no problem with the car, but diagnostics saved by the car’s computer was consistent, they said, with water in the fuel. The checked my fuel tank and filter and found no water. The problem cleared up on its own. I assume this is because the water had settled in the bottom of the fuel tank, and the car had ingested it all. This has happened about three more times in the last year.

My belief is that water in gasoline is more common than we think. Larger engines probably aren’t much affected by small amounts of water, but the Smart car’s engine is small and sensitive. The ethanol alcohol that is added to gasoline attracts water from the atmosphere. The Smart car’s fuel tank, like the fuel tanks on all modern cars, is designed to prevent this. But it probably happens at the service station, from condensation in the underground storage tanks. I have learned to never buy gas from country gas stations and to always go to the busiest, most modern service station available. The longer gasoline is stored, the longer it has a chance to attract water.

The anti-lock brakes have engaged only once in the last year, when a deer ran out in front of me. I wrote about that in a previous post. The stability control system has engaged only once. That was a couple of weeks ago, when I hit some standing water in the roadway at about 50 m.p.h. The stability control system indicator flashed for a couple of seconds, but I felt nothing, and the car kept going straight ahead, feeling perfectly under control.

I love this little car, and it’s actually highly convenient to drive a car that is no bigger than necessary. I just wish that more Americans could appreciate the sensible concepts and excellent German engineering that went into it.

VPN security on all your devices

I have been using VPN encryption on my iMac since October 2011. It has worked great. The company that I signed up with — Private Tunnel — now has apps for iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android, along with the Windows and Macintosh versions.

I’ve written about VPN (virtual private networks) many times in the past as a form of basic computer security that I think we all need. When using a VPN connection on your computer (or smartphone), all Internet traffic into and out of your device is encrypted and sent to your VPN provider’s servers. There it is decrypted, and all your travels on the Internet appear to come from their servers. The sites you are browsing don’t know your real IP address. And your Internet Service Provider (Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) have no way to monitor or track what you’re doing on the Internet, since all your data is encrypted when it passes through their systems.

Private Tunnel has continued to improve their service since I signed up in 2011. I have very rarely had any trouble with it. They’ve also added new servers in Canada and Switzerland, plus a new server in Chicago, in addition to the servers they had in 2011 — San Jose (California) and London. You can choose which of these servers you’d like to use and switch among them as you please. This means that, if you choose, all the sites you visit on the Internet think you are in Switzerland (or whichever server location you choose).

The service costs $10 for 50 gigabytes of data. There is no time limit for using the data. When you run out, you buy more. That much data lasted me a year. You can pay with a credit card, but you also can pay with PayPal, which I think is more secure for Internet transactions. Your iPhone or Android app uses the same Private Tunnel account and draws on the same pool of data.

I have tried other VPN apps on the iPad and iPhone, but they did not work as well as Private Tunnel. The other apps disconnected from VPN every time the device went to sleep, which meant that you had to constantly reconnect. But the Private Tunnel app stays connected as long as the app is running in the background.

I believe I can now reach my goal of encrypting 100 percent of my Internet traffic.

eBay'ing from China: Does it work?

I like to play with electronics, so I order a lot of electronic parts. For a long time, new items have been for sale on eBay for amazing prices, but the seller is in China. I avoided those deals, afraid that neither the seller nor the shipping could be trusted. But when I needed a hard-to-find circuit board and saw what I needed in China for $2.43 plus $1.00 shipping, I figured it was worth a try.

They shipped the board immediately, and it arrived in the mail 13 days later, nicely packaged, and in perfect working order.

As always on eBay, sellers vary, so check their feedback. But if you’re looking for things like smartphone accessories, you might find some good bargains from Chinese sellers.

Food photography at the abbey

I’m always looking to improve my photography, including my food photography. A new (actually used off eBay) camera a while back — a Nikon D1X — was a big step. I recently got a lighting kit for interior photography and food photography.

If you ever watched a professional photo shoot for food photos that are to be published, you know that food photography isn’t easy. I’ve been slouchy in the past for the sake of expediency. For example, holding the camera rather than using a tripod is a good way to reduce the quality of the photo. To prevent jiggling and blurring, a wide aperture must be used to shorten the exposure. A wide aperture means that the depth of field is very low. That is, the broiled tomato may be in focus, but the bacon an inch or two behind it on the plate will be out of focus. The way to correct this is to use a narrow aperture (f stop). A narrow aperture means that the exposure must be longer, hence a tripod. Even with good lighting, the exposure may need to be a full second or longer. So the tripod is essential.

Another important factor with food photography is color management. The color of light varies greatly according to its source. To get true colors, the camera must accurately know (or be able to estimate) the color of the light. Sometimes the color can be corrected by fiddling with the “white point” in Photoshop. But the easiest way to have foods be the right color in a photograph is to use artificial light that is daylight colored — special bulbs. Yippee. I now have such lighting apparatus, plus the white umbrellas that are used to diffuse the light.

Here’s an aside for all who’d like to improve their photography. You’d think, given the way that today’s point-and-shoot digital cameras are marketed, than the number of megapixels is all that matters — the more megapixels, the better the photo. That is completely wrong. Megapixels only matter if you want to print a photo really large — say, the size of a billboard. People who sell digital cameras would like for you to believe that when 8 megapixel cameras are available, 4 megapixel cameras are obsolete. And when 16 megapixel cameras are available, 8 megapixel cameras are obsolete. Totally wrong. All those extra megapixels do is waste storage space on your computer. In some cases, the extra megapixels may help you crop in on a small object in a photo, but chances are that that small object will be blurry, for a number of reasons including the quality of the lens, or focus that is not exact.

My Nikon D1X is 10 years old, and professional photographers have moved on and no longer use them much. But if you’re looking for a camera, you’ll be far better off with a high-quality used camera than with a new camera of lesser quality. The most important factor to the quality of your photos is technique. The second factor, I would say, is the quality of the lens. Another important factor is the internal attributes of the light-sensing and processing parts inside the camera. That gets too technical to go into here, nor do I claim to understand it all. But forget about megapixels.

At this point I’ll plug a book by a neighbor and friend, Jess Moore. The book is Great Pictures Made Simple: How to Make First-Rate Pictures With a Low-Cost Digital Camera or Cell Phone. The book is available on Amazon. Then, when you get good with a low-cost point-and-shoot camera, start shopping for a good camera with a set of good lenses.

Low cost text input devices

One of my bad habits is scouring eBay for older technology that has become cheap but remains useful (or interesting). This Alphasmart 3000 word processor cost me $7.85 on eBay, plus $8.05 shipping.

It’s a simple device. You type, and it stores the text. To retrieve the text, you plug the Alphasmart 3000 into your computer’s USB port. The computer thinks it’s just a keyboard. Press the “SEND” key on the Alphasmart, and the computer thinks that a fast typist is keying text into your word processing program or whatever program is open and receiving keyboard input at the time.

The Alphasmart can hold eight separate files and up to 120 pages of text (though I’m not sure what their definition of a page is). It has rudimentary editing capability, and a spell-checker. There are later versions of the Alphasmart, also available on eBay for somewhat more money. They have bigger text buffers and a somewhat larger LCD screen. And of course you can still buy them new.

Need to type something in bed, or sitting at the picnic table? It works, and the keyboard is much nicer than any confounded laptop I’ve ever seen. Not to mention that it’s much cheaper and less fragile. I think the biggest market for these devices is in schools, so they’re made to take the sort of beating that fifth-graders can give. Its design clearly was inspired by Apple’s clamshell Newton from the 1990s.