the "apple VR watch" will become the one product everyone on Earth needs.
If they truly pull that off, and meanwhile the Android Wear watches stagnate, then they will have achieved the first non-sucky VR watch, history will repeat itself, and they will once again start making piles of money and locking a new set of customers into the Apple walled garden.
The history of Apple features multiple products that were hugely successful because they were game-changers.
The first Mac was a breakthrough in GUI, with easy-to-use and consistent apps. Expensive as it was, it was the first mass-market GUI solution and gained first-mover advantage.
The iPhone was the first non-sucky smartphone, and gained first-mover advantage. It just dominated its market segment for a long time, and it took a free OS (Android) to beat it in market share.
The iPad repeated the iPhone success story: first non-sucky product in its market, first-mover advantage, took a free competitor to beat it.
Each of the above made staggering sums of money for Apple because they were game-changers.
Apple likes making lots of money, so Apple is looking for another game-changer. And it's pretty clear that the iWatch is not another game-changer. It's a "nice to have" product, which will sell well to people who are already on board the iOS platform, but it won't significantly attract new customers.
And unlike the game-changers listed above, when it first shipped it was already facing competition. The iPhone was so much better than other smartphones that it basically didn't have competition when it shipped, but the Android watches already available when the iWatch shipped were roughly as good. (Apple is very good at fit and finish, so the iWatch was arguably better aesthetically, but it had no huge edge in features.)
We can argue over whether the iWatch was a "success" or a "failure" but it hasn't been a huge roaring game-changing success like some previous Apple products.
I'm not sure if there are any game-changing products left that Apple even could invent. Everything I can think of, there is already some sort of product on the market, and those existing products don't suck, so I don't see how Apple can once again just show everyone how it's done and grab a whole bunch of market share. And recent products from Apple don't give me confidence that Apple as an organization is still innovating at that level.
It was very common in the DOS days for applications to use control keys where the key was mnemonic somehow. There are many thousands of DOS apps that used Ctrl+S for Save, Ctrl+P for Print, and so on.
As for cut/copy/paste, yeah, pretty sure Apple did it first and the Microsoft copied it. And...? Are you opposed to this somehow?
I'm really glad that cars were invented over a century ago. If they were invented now, Apple cars would have totally different controls from Microsoft cars and so on, rather than having the pedals and such in a relatively standardized configuration.
In case my car metaphor wasn't clear enough, I disapprove of innovating on fundamental UI elements like "how to cut/copy/paste". I'm glad there is a de-facto standard not owned by Apple or anyone else.
Our screens are way bigger than they were back in the old days, so we have plenty of room for things like menus and toolbars. Yet the trend in modern UI design is to make things magical and non-discoverable.
Just yesterday I helped my father with a problem: the menus and toolbar from Thunderbird were gone. I was on the phone with him for a while. The task was to find the one magic part of the Thunderbird window where he could right-click and find the context menu with the checkboxes for hiding/displaying the main menu and toolbar. Thank goodness I have him running MATE so every window has a title bar... "find the blue bar at the top that says 'Inbox - Mozilla Thunderbird' Now right-click in the dark grey area underneat that, to the right of the tab that says 'Inbox'..." "It didn't work" I'll spare you the back-and-forth, he had multiple tabs and was clicking in a tab to the right of "Inbox". Once I got him over to the correct magic spot, he found the context menu and restored his menu and toolbar. (The stupid hamburger menu is part of the toolbar, and hides with the toolbar... which means it's possible to hide all the menus! And my dad somehow did so by accident!)
The original UI spec for the Macintosh required menus all the time for every app, and the menus had to be in the same place. And I learned very quickly that I could browse the menu, find the command I wanted, and the keyboard shortcut was documented right there in the menu. Hidden menus are far too magical, and if you are going to have them, the very least you should do is to make every context menu have the ability to unhide them, rather than requiring the mouse pointer to be hovering over a particular magical few pixels of your screen.
I also remember the 45 minutes it took to help my dad un-mute YouTube videos. First I had him use the MATE sound preferences dialog to test his speakers, which just took a couple of minutes. Then I had to walk him through moving the mouse pointer over the YouTube video window to make the controls un-hide... (he wasn't full-screen, why do the controls hide when there is plenty of screen real estate available?) Then he had to move the mouse pointer to touch the audio control (and a slider pops out when you get it right) and click to un-mute... and when it's un-muted it says "MUTE". Because when it's un-muted the button becomes the "MUTE" button, and when it's muted the same button becomes the "Un-mute" button. The old-school solution would be a checkbox labelled "MUTE" that's checked when it's muted; the newer way would be a GUI toggle that slides left for un-mute and slides right for mute. There's plenty of screen real estate for either of these.
I know, I know, on mobile devices these magical hiding tricks are not so pointless because screens are smaller. But desktops are not mobile devices and trying to treat them the same is a bad idea.
My dad is not stupid and I don't want to sound like I'm making fun of him. I'm just annoyed over the modern trend in UI design where everything is so magical that it's tricky and weird.
IBM had "Common User Access" (CUA), and Microsoft had "Consistent User Interface" (CUI) guidelines, which were roughly comparable to Apple's.
IBM's standard could only have come from IBM. Save was F12, Save As was Shift+F12, and Print was (IIRC) Ctrl+Shift+F12. Cut/Copy/Paste? Shift+Del/Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Insert. Arrgh.
When Microsoft was trying to be a corporate partner of IBM, they followed the above standard for a while... and then they rebelled and implemented Ctrl+S for Save, Ctrl+P for Print, and Ctrl+X/Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V for Cut/Copy/Paste. And left the CUA ones working because why not. I haven't checked but I imagine the CUA ones still work today; it's not like the UI designers are falling all over themselves wanting to use Ctrl+Shift+F12 or Shift+Del for anything.
In the world of UIs today, there's way too much frosting and not nearly enough cake.
If [San Francisco] allowed more new housing to be built, along with improving public transportation to accommodate greater demand, these problems would diminish.
I believe the problem can be summed up succinctly:
Many people in San Francisco don't want any new buildings; they say the existing buildings are part of the charm of SF and they worry about sprawl. Some of them even have the idea that building new stuff causes housing costs to go up due to "gentrification".
Many people in San Francisco don't want the cost of housing to go up; they decry the trends where only wealthy people (many of them young technical workers at hot companies like Google) can live in SF, and they complain that the city would be more interesting with more starving artists, poets, musicians, etc. (And many hate the private bus systems offered by companies like Google.)
Take both of the above together, and the people of San Francisco are never going to be happy. Not allowing more building capacity means prices will go up, prices going up means that artists and poets can't afford to live in the city. Protesting against the "Google Buses" does nothing to help any problems and just annoys people.
Both the original Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back were officially added to the National Film Registry when it was created in the late 1980s. However, Lucasfilm never delivered an original, unmodified copy of either movie. George Lucas tried to give the NFR a copy of the "improved" edition, but they refused it; their mandate is to preserve original versions of historic movies.
The article notes that ironically enough, George Lucas argued against colorizing old black-and-white movies, yet he has refused to follow his own arguments with respect to his own movies.
I hope that Disney will deliver a suitable cleaned-up archival copy of the original, completely unmodified movie to the NFR.
P.S. I personally would be happy to have a version that has some hidden wire removal and other very minor cleanups. Probably the perfect way to do it is to release a new slightly-polished cleaned-up original, with bonus disc content of the original, cleaned up but utterly unchanged. Watching the movie over and over on a 4K screen, you will spot wires and other glitches to some extent... but there should be a version where they are perfectly preserved. It's a movie that was made in the 1970's. It was an advance in the state of the art of special effects, but it wasn't perfect and couldn't have been perfect. Sometimes it's instructive or fun to watch things and study how they were made.
When George Lucas announced the "improved" versions of the classic Star Wars movies, he famously claimed that it would be impossible to recreate the original release versions. He said something like he had accidentally "taped over" the originals (for you younglings, that's a video tape analogy).
As this article commented bitingly, it would have been embarrassing for Lucas if the original version had outsold the "improved" version on home video release. So it was sure convenient for him that it was totally impossible to re-create the original version.
The article quotes someone named Bill Hunt saying this: "Even if it's true that Lucas and his staff destroyed all of the original negatives, it's unlikely in the extreme that they also destroyed all of the interpositives, all of the separation masters, and all of the release prints. In fact, we know that they didn't." And lo and behold, once George Lucas sold the rights, it turned out to be possible to recreate the original version, and now there's a 4K cleaned-up version.
I was rather more hoping for a summary than a direct link to the 2007 report.
If I were a global warming scientist, I would already have read through those hundreds of pages. As a non-scientist, with things I need to do, I somewhat rely on news stories, like this one:
One of the central issues is believed to be why the IPCC failed to account for the âoepauseâ in global warming, which they admit that they did not predict in their computer models. Since 1997, world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase. The summary also shows that scientist have now discovered that between 950 and 1250 AD, before the Industrial Revolution, parts of the world were as warm for decades at a time as they are now.
Despite a 2012 draft stating that the world is at itâ(TM)s warmest for 1,300 years, the latest document states: âoe'Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.â
The tone is rather tendentious (especially the second PDF) but I find the arguments compelling. As I understand it, the CAGW theory is that feedbacks will cause the warming to "run away" precipitously once we reach a cruical tipping point, but the PDFs have graphs showing the Earth once had a significantly higher CO2 concentration than currently without turning into another Venus. The annual news stories about "the previous year was the warmest on record" don't seem to mention error bars, and when I tracked some down I was astonished to see that the margin for the "warmest" claim was a small fraction of the uncertainty interval. And in my original post, now modded down to 0 score, I provided the link to an article with graphs comparing the predicted temperature increases with what actually were recorded.
I have seen proposals for a carbon tax that was intended to take trillions of dollars out of the economy. (The authors of the proposal viewed this as a feature: trillions of tax dollars of additional revenue for the US government! I personally don't think you can get something for nothing, so I worry about the harm that would occur if that level of tax was levied.) I think that this level of tax should require a high level of confidence, and I personally am not at that level yet.
Thank you for responding politely. You haven't convinced me and I likely haven't convinced you, but I hope you at least believe that I'm genuinely skeptical and not just trolling or trying to flame people about this.
So if someone could please post links to the most persuasive proof that we should all be worried about carbon dioxide levels, I'll take a look.
So far nobody has posted any links to CAGW proof, but my post has been moderated "Flamebait" and "Overrated". Folks, if you are trying to convince me of the science behind CAGW, that's not the optimal strategy.
These claims were put forward by Norman Myers. After the prediction didn't pan out for 2010, he made updated claims: now it will be 200 million displaced, by 2050.
I'm not a climate scientist, but as far as I can tell, the worries about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have led to very few testable predictions, and the few that have been tested have not proven out. The predicted sea level rise and flooding by 2010 didn't happen, and the computer models that try to predict warming due to carbon dioxide are very far off their predictions.
People argue over whether there was a "global warming pause" or not, but I think it's pretty clear that even if global warming didn't pause, the total carbon dioxide concentration went up a lot during that time yet the predicted temperature rises didn't occur.
There is a saying: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not convinced that the claims of global warming problems even rise to the level of ordinary evidence, let alone extraordinary.
So if someone could please post links to the most persuasive proof that we should all be worried about carbon dioxide levels, I'll take a look. But at the moment, I think we have plenty of other worries that are higher priority.
P.S. The article suggests that Boko Haram is being driven by climate change. Boko Haram itself says that it is driven by a desire to create an Islamic state and to impose Sharia law. I view this attempt to form a linkage between climate change and Boko Haram as unsubstantiated hand-waving. As I understand it, the claimed link is that global warming leads to displaced and impoverished people who are more likely to join Boko Haram, but I'd like to see some evidence. Are there any factors other than climate change that might lead to people being displaced and impoverished? How do you control for such factors in any predictions?
Almost all of [radiative waste from coal] is thorium, which does not bioaccumulate, and is nearly harmless in the quantities and concentrations produced in coal ash.
If, and I say if, all the thorium is filtered from the coal smoke before it goes out the smokestack, then I'll agree that the radiation is a bit of a red herring here. I still think it's a useful lesson to people who are nervous about nuclear power to tell them that coal smoke is radioactive, to hopefully get it through their minds that radioactivity is part of nature.
If thorium ash is not filtered out, and allowed to go out into the atmosphere to be breathed into peoples' lungs, then I'm pretty nervous about that. That's an experiment I don't want to conduct upon my own lungs, thank you very much.
Let's avoid the problem completely by switching to natural gas, nuclear, solar, etc.
There are plenty of very good reasons to oppose coal power, but "radiation" isn't one of them.
We'll just lump the radiation in with other unacceptable pollution caused by burning coal.
Does Fedora have an ncurses app for exploring packages, such as aptitude? Last time I looked at it, as far as I could tell you had pure command-line tools (rpg and yum) and full GUI tools but nothing like aptitude.
I particularly like the way vi keys work as expected inside aptitude. For me it is a fantastic way to browse through packages, see what I have installed, etc. I would have tried out Fedora by now if I knew I could use aptitude on it.
on a single sweep the GOP gained control of the White House, congress and, as soon as vacancies are filled, the Supreme Court. Don't expect a lot of pushbacks on those ends.
It depends:
If Trump tries to lighten the amount of regulations on businesses, don't expect a lot of pushback. If he tries to lower taxes, don't expect a lot of pushback.
But a relative of mine said that Trump will start rounding up minorities and putting them into concentration camps. If Trump tries to do anything like that? Pushback. Expect it.
If Trump tries to strip LGBT of equal protection under the law? (I don't know why we are even talking about that, he hasn't historically been negative about LGBT, but my liberal friends are saying he will be a disaster to LGBT.) Again, expect pushback.
In short, don't expect a lot of pushback on the typical center-right issues. But if Trump actually starts doing any of the deranged dictator stuff that my liberal friends are staying awake at night worrying about, do expect pushback. Lots.
I even expect pushback if Trump goes crazy with Executive Orders. For some reason the Congress just took it when President Obama started overstepping the bounds of the Presidency, but I really don't think the Congress will take it from Trump. All the Democrats would be opposed and enough of the Republicans would be opposed.
Also, I'm grimly looking forward to the spectacle once the Republicans start nominating Supreme Court Justices. I expect the Democrats to link arms and obstruct every single candidate, no matter how reasonable and qualified. If they actually do this I then expect to see the Republicans invoke the Harry Reid precedent and shut down the filibuster on Supreme Court Justice nominations. I don't actually want to see this happen, but the silver lining would be the entertainment of watching liberals explain how the Harry Reid precedent isn't really a precedent at all, it's totally different this time, etc.
if America voted for Trump to break the "the status quo of the elite ruling over us" then you deserve what's coming your way.
Of Trump and Hillary Clinton, which of the two has been in politics for three decades? Which of the two had their political party's highest leadership game the primaries to guarantee they won the candidacy? Which of the two engaged in a conspiracy to repeatedly violate the laws pertaining to handling of classified information, and then had the Director of the FBI personally whitewash the investigation? Which of the two had the news media helping to bury strong evidence of felony lawbreaking?
It wasn't Trump.
You can be sarcastic all you want, but the news media will be all over Trump, watching for him to do the slightest wrong thing and tell all the voters about it 24/7 for weeks. (He's already in hot water for the crime of telling reporters "I'm done for the night" and then going to dinner with his family. Doesn't he know that the reporters have a right to watch him eat dinner?)
The Congress will actually push back on Trump if he tries to aggregate more power to the Presidency (contrast to President "I've Got a Pen, and I've Got a Phone" Obama, bypassing Congress to bind the USA to international agreements that sure looked like treaties but were not treaties because he said so).
The IRS would refuse to follow Trumps orders if he were to try to sic them on his enemies, while the IRS actually volunteered to do this for President Obama. (I don't think the bad actors in the IRS did it because they personally liked President Obama, they did it because he was a "progressive" Democrat... so they absolutely would have continued to do this for Hillary Clinton.)
The Republican establishment never wanted Trump. He's already shaking things up in Washington D.C.
So I'll grant you that Trump is in the 1% and thus not very well connected to the daily struggles of the "little people" in America. But of the two candidates, which one just might "break 'the status quo of the elite ruling over us'"? Trump. By a landslide. It's not even remotely close.
I consider myself to be very much a Heinlein fan. His later novels were in fact not very good, and I say that as a fan. The best you can say is "they had their moments"... The Cat Who Walks Through Walls had a few fun moments that I remember, but I really don't recommend it.
I don't think any of Heinlein's novels were finished by someone else. However, Heinlein's notes for a novel were discovered, and Spider Robinson was given the task of writing a novel from the notes; this might be what you remembered.
Heinlein is justly famous for his "juveniles" (Young Adult novels), but those books are only about a dozen out of his total body of work, so I don't think you can fairly say they were "most" of his fiction. My all-time favorite Heinlein novel is one of the juveniles: Citizen of the Galaxy, a cracking good story full of interesting ideas.
Like you, I enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I read it at an early age, and it convinced me logically that polyamorous marriages are a good idea. If a kid grows up with lots of parents, they can all take turns babysitting or going out, it would be easier for any of the parents to work a part-time job, and if one parent died it would be easier on kids and spouses than if there were only two parents and one died. If the highest purpose of a marriage is to raise children, which I think is a defensible proposition, then anything that improves the chances for success would be a good thing. (People argue that the idea of a one man/one woman marriage is the only time-tested and thoroughly understood kind of marriage; but we don't take kids away from a parent whose spouse dies, and you will never convince me that multiple parents in any combination of sexes will inherently do a worse job of raising kids than a single parent.)
I have a dim understanding that modern physics believes that faster-than-light travel is not possible, full stop. I don't quite understand the equivalence, but FTL is the equivalent of time travel, and since we believe that time travel would violate causality, we believe that FTL is impossible no matter what mechanism you propose (teleportation, hyperspace, whatever).
Even with the pretty diagrams I'm not sure I get it.
I've also read that FTL shouldn't be impossible if the whole universe had a common frame of reference, but according to the theory of relativity, there is no such common frame of reference in the universe. But I've read a couple of discussions that say that maybe FTL would be possible if "hyperspace" or "subspace" travel imposes a common frame of reference. Again I don't really understand this.
I'd love it if someone with physics understanding could explain it in a way that my poor grasp of physics can understand, using car analogies or whatever.
Well it looks like the USB A connector has had a good ~20 year run.
That's a good point. And I'd much rather see USB-C emerge as the ubiquitous one than the special blue USB-A with the extra pins (paired with the special blue USB-B with extra pins, giant and ugly), or the weird Micro-USB connector that is extra wide.
The rule should be "if you see USB-A, assume USB 2.x or older; if you see USB-C, you can assume you get USB 3.x speeds."
By the time USB-C becomes ubiquitous, USB-D will be introduced and the whole thing starts all over again.
Unlikely. Everyone's tired of the shifting standards and everyone is ready to take a break and let USB-C become ubiquitous.
USB-C allows the full bandwidth of USB 3.1 to be used, allows enough power to run a real laptop, and has a well-designed connector (good connection, and the only USB connector that is symmetric so there is no "upside-down", it works either way). Also when USB-C becomes ubiquitous, you will only need a cable with USB-C on both ends; you won't need a cable with an A connector on one end and a B connector on the other end. In short, USB-C is a compelling new standard and the industry is driving toward it.
At this time there just isn't anything left that USB-C cannot do, which would require a new connector. People are saying that USB-C will be a standard for the next 20 years. That's a long time in technology, so I don't know if it will last 20 years, but it will certainly last 5 to 10 years.
It's the support for commercial applications people actually want to use, without having to compromise with shitty FOSS alternatives. Linux is a pain in the ass in that regard.
I've been running Linux for a bunch of years now and I'm content with the FOSS stuff. I buy Windows games on the Steam store sometimes, and I can imagine someone really needing an audio workstation or a video editor or something. But the basics (email, web, watching videos, word processor, spreadsheet, etc) are all solid.
That said I am willing to pay money for Linux software, if anyone would bother to sell any. I bought the legal video codecs pack and the DVD player from Fluendo and I'd buy a video editor or whatever.
I agree the new macbooks seem overpriced, but what's the alternative?
For me: Linux on decent hardware. All my desktop computers are AMD (for the price/performance and because I hate Intel) but I do have a ThinkPad notebook. Good keyboard, good touchpad, good screen, docking station, it's all-around good.
Linux hasn't been difficult to install for years now. In fact, if you have the technical skills to install Windows, you can install Linux, and you are likely to have an easier time. The exception would be wacky brand-new hardware; trying to cope with Linux kernel drivers is still a pain. But for my ThinkPad, everything Just Works with Linux, no special effort needed. Just boot from the installer USB flash drive and oh hey, you are in a GUI desktop with wifi and network and audio and graphics all working.
How are workers supposed to dig into the roads to install cables, lay need sewer lines/etc?
It's a different basic idea. I'm not sure how wise the idea is, but I can definitively tell you that they have thought about your concerns.
Here's how a solar roadway install would go:
First, dig up the old road, and install a mounting frame for the modular panels. Along one side of the road is a special underground service tunnel, and bundles of heavy cables run along that; this is the electrical bus, which lets multiple solar panels aggregate their output. Also in the special tunnel is the designed drainage, so that when it rains there is some place for the rain to go, and it is possible to install electric pumps to make sure the rain goes where it needs to go. The web site calls this the "Cable Corridor". One of the claimed benefits is this lets electrical transmission wires be conveniently underground by the roadway, instead of up on poles where winds can bring them down.
If one of the solar road modules is damaged, or just stops working correctly, that one module is removed and replaced with another off-the-shelf module. The initial install will cost more than an ordinary road, and the modules cost more than an equivalent volume of asphalt or concrete, but the labor of swapping a single module is going to be massively less than repaving a pothole. I reckon that to fix one panel you would just need one or two people and a pickup truck; for fixing a pothole in a normal roadway you would need a digging machine, asphalt machine, steamroller machine, and people to drive all the machines.
The surface of the modules is textured glass: textured to make it less slippery. One of my questions is whether the texture will be ground down and polished away after a few years of heavy use, leaving a horribly slick and dangerous glass surface. Another of my questions is how often the mounting frame under the road will need repair or replacement... it's simple to swap out modules, but not so simple to pull all the modules, dig up the frame, and lay a new one.
If the solar modules last longer than asphalt, this may turn out to be a much better way to go, but that seems like an incredibly big if.
It's also not clear to me why the solar modules should be the road, rather than a roof mounted high over the road, with sloped sides to keep rain and snow from accumulating on the roof. Why melt snow off the road when you can keep it off with a roof?
After I read up on their web site, I did some math, and I determined that according to their numbers, each solar module will make something like $2 worth of electricity per month. I don't imagine the lifetime of the modules will ever be long enough that they would pay for themselves. So this is a good idea only if the reduced labor costs of swapping modules (vs. repaving a conventional road) work out to a net savings. Best to treat the free electricity as a small bonus, rather than gushing about how if 100% of all roadways were replaced with this technology, it could power the entire USA for free. And the part on their web page where they actually propose rewiring everyone's homes to run on DC power makes me wonder if these guys have practical engineering experience or are just pure ivory-tower types in love with a pretty theory.
I guess if massive mass production occurs of these modules, the cost could come down a bit. If the mass-produced panels are cheap enough, if they last long enough, and if the cost of the initial install isn't too horrible, these might be economic. If, if, if.
(a) Appeal to authority. Facts are true or they aren't, and the majority opinion of scientists doesn't affect that.
(b) Catastrophism was proposed by J. Harlen Bretz as an explanation of the geologic features of the Channelled Scablands in Washington state. Basically he mapped out a bunch of geologic features and proposed that they were created by a catastrophic event: the unleashing of a tremendous volume of water that carved out new geologic features in a matter of days.
He was completely dismissed as a crackpot when he proposed it; not just wrong, but also not qualified to have any opinions on geology. The accepted dogma of the time was that everything in geology takes geologic time, not just most things (a strict form of uniformitarianism). 40 years later, his theories became accepted as correct by the mainstream geology community.
P.S. The modern view of uniformitarianism in geology is that most of the time things change slowly as they have all along, but sometimes catastrophic events like a megaflood or a volcanic eruption or a meteor impact can have a sudden effect. This just seems like common sense to me, but I guess the strict form of uniformitarianism seemed like common sense in 1923.
Slashdot Mirror
the "apple VR watch" will become the one product everyone on Earth needs.
If they truly pull that off, and meanwhile the Android Wear watches stagnate, then they will have achieved the first non-sucky VR watch, history will repeat itself, and they will once again start making piles of money and locking a new set of customers into the Apple walled garden.
If.
We'll see.
The history of Apple features multiple products that were hugely successful because they were game-changers.
The first Mac was a breakthrough in GUI, with easy-to-use and consistent apps. Expensive as it was, it was the first mass-market GUI solution and gained first-mover advantage.
The iPhone was the first non-sucky smartphone, and gained first-mover advantage. It just dominated its market segment for a long time, and it took a free OS (Android) to beat it in market share.
The iPad repeated the iPhone success story: first non-sucky product in its market, first-mover advantage, took a free competitor to beat it.
Each of the above made staggering sums of money for Apple because they were game-changers.
Apple likes making lots of money, so Apple is looking for another game-changer. And it's pretty clear that the iWatch is not another game-changer. It's a "nice to have" product, which will sell well to people who are already on board the iOS platform, but it won't significantly attract new customers.
And unlike the game-changers listed above, when it first shipped it was already facing competition. The iPhone was so much better than other smartphones that it basically didn't have competition when it shipped, but the Android watches already available when the iWatch shipped were roughly as good. (Apple is very good at fit and finish, so the iWatch was arguably better aesthetically, but it had no huge edge in features.)
We can argue over whether the iWatch was a "success" or a "failure" but it hasn't been a huge roaring game-changing success like some previous Apple products.
I'm not sure if there are any game-changing products left that Apple even could invent. Everything I can think of, there is already some sort of product on the market, and those existing products don't suck, so I don't see how Apple can once again just show everyone how it's done and grab a whole bunch of market share. And recent products from Apple don't give me confidence that Apple as an organization is still innovating at that level.
because Microsoft ripped it off from Apple
It was very common in the DOS days for applications to use control keys where the key was mnemonic somehow. There are many thousands of DOS apps that used Ctrl+S for Save, Ctrl+P for Print, and so on.
As for cut/copy/paste, yeah, pretty sure Apple did it first and the Microsoft copied it. And...? Are you opposed to this somehow?
I'm really glad that cars were invented over a century ago. If they were invented now, Apple cars would have totally different controls from Microsoft cars and so on, rather than having the pedals and such in a relatively standardized configuration.
In case my car metaphor wasn't clear enough, I disapprove of innovating on fundamental UI elements like "how to cut/copy/paste". I'm glad there is a de-facto standard not owned by Apple or anyone else.
Our screens are way bigger than they were back in the old days, so we have plenty of room for things like menus and toolbars. Yet the trend in modern UI design is to make things magical and non-discoverable.
Just yesterday I helped my father with a problem: the menus and toolbar from Thunderbird were gone. I was on the phone with him for a while. The task was to find the one magic part of the Thunderbird window where he could right-click and find the context menu with the checkboxes for hiding/displaying the main menu and toolbar. Thank goodness I have him running MATE so every window has a title bar... "find the blue bar at the top that says 'Inbox - Mozilla Thunderbird' Now right-click in the dark grey area underneat that, to the right of the tab that says 'Inbox'..." "It didn't work" I'll spare you the back-and-forth, he had multiple tabs and was clicking in a tab to the right of "Inbox". Once I got him over to the correct magic spot, he found the context menu and restored his menu and toolbar. (The stupid hamburger menu is part of the toolbar, and hides with the toolbar... which means it's possible to hide all the menus! And my dad somehow did so by accident!)
The original UI spec for the Macintosh required menus all the time for every app, and the menus had to be in the same place. And I learned very quickly that I could browse the menu, find the command I wanted, and the keyboard shortcut was documented right there in the menu. Hidden menus are far too magical, and if you are going to have them, the very least you should do is to make every context menu have the ability to unhide them, rather than requiring the mouse pointer to be hovering over a particular magical few pixels of your screen.
I also remember the 45 minutes it took to help my dad un-mute YouTube videos. First I had him use the MATE sound preferences dialog to test his speakers, which just took a couple of minutes. Then I had to walk him through moving the mouse pointer over the YouTube video window to make the controls un-hide... (he wasn't full-screen, why do the controls hide when there is plenty of screen real estate available?) Then he had to move the mouse pointer to touch the audio control (and a slider pops out when you get it right) and click to un-mute... and when it's un-muted it says "MUTE". Because when it's un-muted the button becomes the "MUTE" button, and when it's muted the same button becomes the "Un-mute" button. The old-school solution would be a checkbox labelled "MUTE" that's checked when it's muted; the newer way would be a GUI toggle that slides left for un-mute and slides right for mute. There's plenty of screen real estate for either of these.
I know, I know, on mobile devices these magical hiding tricks are not so pointless because screens are smaller. But desktops are not mobile devices and trying to treat them the same is a bad idea.
My dad is not stupid and I don't want to sound like I'm making fun of him. I'm just annoyed over the modern trend in UI design where everything is so magical that it's tricky and weird.
IBM had "Common User Access" (CUA), and Microsoft had "Consistent User Interface" (CUI) guidelines, which were roughly comparable to Apple's.
IBM's standard could only have come from IBM. Save was F12, Save As was Shift+F12, and Print was (IIRC) Ctrl+Shift+F12. Cut/Copy/Paste? Shift+Del/Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Insert. Arrgh.
When Microsoft was trying to be a corporate partner of IBM, they followed the above standard for a while... and then they rebelled and implemented Ctrl+S for Save, Ctrl+P for Print, and Ctrl+X/Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V for Cut/Copy/Paste. And left the CUA ones working because why not. I haven't checked but I imagine the CUA ones still work today; it's not like the UI designers are falling all over themselves wanting to use Ctrl+Shift+F12 or Shift+Del for anything.
In the world of UIs today, there's way too much frosting and not nearly enough cake.
I agree completely.
If [San Francisco] allowed more new housing to be built, along with improving public transportation to accommodate greater demand, these problems would diminish.
I believe the problem can be summed up succinctly:
Many people in San Francisco don't want any new buildings; they say the existing buildings are part of the charm of SF and they worry about sprawl. Some of them even have the idea that building new stuff causes housing costs to go up due to "gentrification".
Many people in San Francisco don't want the cost of housing to go up; they decry the trends where only wealthy people (many of them young technical workers at hot companies like Google) can live in SF, and they complain that the city would be more interesting with more starving artists, poets, musicians, etc. (And many hate the private bus systems offered by companies like Google.)
Take both of the above together, and the people of San Francisco are never going to be happy. Not allowing more building capacity means prices will go up, prices going up means that artists and poets can't afford to live in the city. Protesting against the "Google Buses" does nothing to help any problems and just annoys people.
Both the original Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back were officially added to the National Film Registry when it was created in the late 1980s. However, Lucasfilm never delivered an original, unmodified copy of either movie. George Lucas tried to give the NFR a copy of the "improved" edition, but they refused it; their mandate is to preserve original versions of historic movies.
http://www.popoptiq.com/a-new-new-hope-film-preservation-and-the-problem-with-star-wars/
The article notes that ironically enough, George Lucas argued against colorizing old black-and-white movies, yet he has refused to follow his own arguments with respect to his own movies.
I hope that Disney will deliver a suitable cleaned-up archival copy of the original, completely unmodified movie to the NFR.
P.S. I personally would be happy to have a version that has some hidden wire removal and other very minor cleanups. Probably the perfect way to do it is to release a new slightly-polished cleaned-up original, with bonus disc content of the original, cleaned up but utterly unchanged. Watching the movie over and over on a 4K screen, you will spot wires and other glitches to some extent... but there should be a version where they are perfectly preserved. It's a movie that was made in the 1970's. It was an advance in the state of the art of special effects, but it wasn't perfect and couldn't have been perfect. Sometimes it's instructive or fun to watch things and study how they were made.
When George Lucas announced the "improved" versions of the classic Star Wars movies, he famously claimed that it would be impossible to recreate the original release versions. He said something like he had accidentally "taped over" the originals (for you younglings, that's a video tape analogy).
As this article commented bitingly, it would have been embarrassing for Lucas if the original version had outsold the "improved" version on home video release. So it was sure convenient for him that it was totally impossible to re-create the original version.
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/23493
The article quotes someone named Bill Hunt saying this: "Even if it's true that Lucas and his staff destroyed all of the original negatives, it's unlikely in the extreme that they also destroyed all of the interpositives, all of the separation masters, and all of the release prints. In fact, we know that they didn't." And lo and behold, once George Lucas sold the rights, it turned out to be possible to recreate the original version, and now there's a 4K cleaned-up version.
I was rather more hoping for a summary than a direct link to the 2007 report.
If I were a global warming scientist, I would already have read through those hundreds of pages. As a non-scientist, with things I need to do, I somewhat rely on news stories, like this one:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/10310712/Top-climate-scientists-admit-global-warming-forecasts-were-wrong.html
And then I read through the PDFs at this site:
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/
The tone is rather tendentious (especially the second PDF) but I find the arguments compelling. As I understand it, the CAGW theory is that feedbacks will cause the warming to "run away" precipitously once we reach a cruical tipping point, but the PDFs have graphs showing the Earth once had a significantly higher CO2 concentration than currently without turning into another Venus. The annual news stories about "the previous year was the warmest on record" don't seem to mention error bars, and when I tracked some down I was astonished to see that the margin for the "warmest" claim was a small fraction of the uncertainty interval. And in my original post, now modded down to 0 score, I provided the link to an article with graphs comparing the predicted temperature increases with what actually were recorded.
I have seen proposals for a carbon tax that was intended to take trillions of dollars out of the economy. (The authors of the proposal viewed this as a feature: trillions of tax dollars of additional revenue for the US government! I personally don't think you can get something for nothing, so I worry about the harm that would occur if that level of tax was levied.) I think that this level of tax should require a high level of confidence, and I personally am not at that level yet.
Thank you for responding politely. You haven't convinced me and I likely haven't convinced you, but I hope you at least believe that I'm genuinely skeptical and not just trolling or trying to flame people about this.
So if someone could please post links to the most persuasive proof that we should all be worried about carbon dioxide levels, I'll take a look.
So far nobody has posted any links to CAGW proof, but my post has been moderated "Flamebait" and "Overrated". Folks, if you are trying to convince me of the science behind CAGW, that's not the optimal strategy.
In 2005, there was a prediction that 50 million people would be displaced by global warming by 2010. Didn't even come close to coming true.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/feared-migration-hasn-t-happened-un-embarrassed-by-forecast-on-climate-refugees-a-757713.html
This article has a rather strident tone but has solid links to document the above story.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/15/the-un-disappears-50-million-climate-refugees-then-botches-the-disappearing-attempt/
These claims were put forward by Norman Myers. After the prediction didn't pan out for 2010, he made updated claims: now it will be 200 million displaced, by 2050.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23899195
I'm not a climate scientist, but as far as I can tell, the worries about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have led to very few testable predictions, and the few that have been tested have not proven out. The predicted sea level rise and flooding by 2010 didn't happen, and the computer models that try to predict warming due to carbon dioxide are very far off their predictions.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/13/the-abject-failure-of-official-global-warming-predictions/
People argue over whether there was a "global warming pause" or not, but I think it's pretty clear that even if global warming didn't pause, the total carbon dioxide concentration went up a lot during that time yet the predicted temperature rises didn't occur.
There is a saying: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not convinced that the claims of global warming problems even rise to the level of ordinary evidence, let alone extraordinary.
So if someone could please post links to the most persuasive proof that we should all be worried about carbon dioxide levels, I'll take a look. But at the moment, I think we have plenty of other worries that are higher priority.
P.S. The article suggests that Boko Haram is being driven by climate change. Boko Haram itself says that it is driven by a desire to create an Islamic state and to impose Sharia law. I view this attempt to form a linkage between climate change and Boko Haram as unsubstantiated hand-waving. As I understand it, the claimed link is that global warming leads to displaced and impoverished people who are more likely to join Boko Haram, but I'd like to see some evidence. Are there any factors other than climate change that might lead to people being displaced and impoverished? How do you control for such factors in any predictions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram#Ideology
Almost all of [radiative waste from coal] is thorium, which does not bioaccumulate, and is nearly harmless in the quantities and concentrations produced in coal ash.
If, and I say if, all the thorium is filtered from the coal smoke before it goes out the smokestack, then I'll agree that the radiation is a bit of a red herring here. I still think it's a useful lesson to people who are nervous about nuclear power to tell them that coal smoke is radioactive, to hopefully get it through their minds that radioactivity is part of nature.
If thorium ash is not filtered out, and allowed to go out into the atmosphere to be breathed into peoples' lungs, then I'm pretty nervous about that. That's an experiment I don't want to conduct upon my own lungs, thank you very much.
Let's avoid the problem completely by switching to natural gas, nuclear, solar, etc.
There are plenty of very good reasons to oppose coal power, but "radiation" isn't one of them.
We'll just lump the radiation in with other unacceptable pollution caused by burning coal.
Does Fedora have an ncurses app for exploring packages, such as aptitude? Last time I looked at it, as far as I could tell you had pure command-line tools (rpg and yum) and full GUI tools but nothing like aptitude.
https://wiki.debian.org/Aptitude
I particularly like the way vi keys work as expected inside aptitude. For me it is a fantastic way to browse through packages, see what I have installed, etc. I would have tried out Fedora by now if I knew I could use aptitude on it.
on a single sweep the GOP gained control of the White House, congress and, as soon as vacancies are filled, the Supreme Court. Don't expect a lot of pushbacks on those ends.
It depends:
If Trump tries to lighten the amount of regulations on businesses, don't expect a lot of pushback. If he tries to lower taxes, don't expect a lot of pushback.
But a relative of mine said that Trump will start rounding up minorities and putting them into concentration camps. If Trump tries to do anything like that? Pushback. Expect it.
If Trump tries to strip LGBT of equal protection under the law? (I don't know why we are even talking about that, he hasn't historically been negative about LGBT, but my liberal friends are saying he will be a disaster to LGBT.) Again, expect pushback.
In short, don't expect a lot of pushback on the typical center-right issues. But if Trump actually starts doing any of the deranged dictator stuff that my liberal friends are staying awake at night worrying about, do expect pushback. Lots.
I even expect pushback if Trump goes crazy with Executive Orders. For some reason the Congress just took it when President Obama started overstepping the bounds of the Presidency, but I really don't think the Congress will take it from Trump. All the Democrats would be opposed and enough of the Republicans would be opposed.
Also, I'm grimly looking forward to the spectacle once the Republicans start nominating Supreme Court Justices. I expect the Democrats to link arms and obstruct every single candidate, no matter how reasonable and qualified. If they actually do this I then expect to see the Republicans invoke the Harry Reid precedent and shut down the filibuster on Supreme Court Justice nominations. I don't actually want to see this happen, but the silver lining would be the entertainment of watching liberals explain how the Harry Reid precedent isn't really a precedent at all, it's totally different this time, etc.
if America voted for Trump to break the "the status quo of the elite ruling over us" then you deserve what's coming your way.
Of Trump and Hillary Clinton, which of the two has been in politics for three decades? Which of the two had their political party's highest leadership game the primaries to guarantee they won the candidacy? Which of the two engaged in a conspiracy to repeatedly violate the laws pertaining to handling of classified information, and then had the Director of the FBI personally whitewash the investigation? Which of the two had the news media helping to bury strong evidence of felony lawbreaking?
It wasn't Trump.
You can be sarcastic all you want, but the news media will be all over Trump, watching for him to do the slightest wrong thing and tell all the voters about it 24/7 for weeks. (He's already in hot water for the crime of telling reporters "I'm done for the night" and then going to dinner with his family. Doesn't he know that the reporters have a right to watch him eat dinner?)
The Congress will actually push back on Trump if he tries to aggregate more power to the Presidency (contrast to President "I've Got a Pen, and I've Got a Phone" Obama, bypassing Congress to bind the USA to international agreements that sure looked like treaties but were not treaties because he said so).
The IRS would refuse to follow Trumps orders if he were to try to sic them on his enemies, while the IRS actually volunteered to do this for President Obama. (I don't think the bad actors in the IRS did it because they personally liked President Obama, they did it because he was a "progressive" Democrat... so they absolutely would have continued to do this for Hillary Clinton.)
The Republican establishment never wanted Trump. He's already shaking things up in Washington D.C.
So I'll grant you that Trump is in the 1% and thus not very well connected to the daily struggles of the "little people" in America. But of the two candidates, which one just might "break 'the status quo of the elite ruling over us'"? Trump. By a landslide. It's not even remotely close.
I consider myself to be very much a Heinlein fan. His later novels were in fact not very good, and I say that as a fan. The best you can say is "they had their moments"... The Cat Who Walks Through Walls had a few fun moments that I remember, but I really don't recommend it.
I don't think any of Heinlein's novels were finished by someone else. However, Heinlein's notes for a novel were discovered, and Spider Robinson was given the task of writing a novel from the notes; this might be what you remembered.
Heinlein is justly famous for his "juveniles" (Young Adult novels), but those books are only about a dozen out of his total body of work, so I don't think you can fairly say they were "most" of his fiction. My all-time favorite Heinlein novel is one of the juveniles: Citizen of the Galaxy, a cracking good story full of interesting ideas.
Like you, I enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I read it at an early age, and it convinced me logically that polyamorous marriages are a good idea. If a kid grows up with lots of parents, they can all take turns babysitting or going out, it would be easier for any of the parents to work a part-time job, and if one parent died it would be easier on kids and spouses than if there were only two parents and one died. If the highest purpose of a marriage is to raise children, which I think is a defensible proposition, then anything that improves the chances for success would be a good thing. (People argue that the idea of a one man/one woman marriage is the only time-tested and thoroughly understood kind of marriage; but we don't take kids away from a parent whose spouse dies, and you will never convince me that multiple parents in any combination of sexes will inherently do a worse job of raising kids than a single parent.)
This is a clip of an Apple representative explaining the changes to the MacBook Pro value proposition.
https://youtu.be/jsW9MlYu31g
Hmm... persuasive, but I'm still not planning to buy the new MacBook Pro.
I have a dim understanding that modern physics believes that faster-than-light travel is not possible, full stop. I don't quite understand the equivalence, but FTL is the equivalent of time travel, and since we believe that time travel would violate causality, we believe that FTL is impossible no matter what mechanism you propose (teleportation, hyperspace, whatever).
Even with the pretty diagrams I'm not sure I get it.
http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html
I've also read that FTL shouldn't be impossible if the whole universe had a common frame of reference, but according to the theory of relativity, there is no such common frame of reference in the universe. But I've read a couple of discussions that say that maybe FTL would be possible if "hyperspace" or "subspace" travel imposes a common frame of reference. Again I don't really understand this.
http://www.calormen.com/star_trek/FAQs/warp-faq.htm
I'd love it if someone with physics understanding could explain it in a way that my poor grasp of physics can understand, using car analogies or whatever.
Police Officer: "The light was red; you went through an intersection on a stop light"
Starship Officer: "It was green at the speed I was going"
Did you know that before he wrote the novel The Martian, Andy Weir had a geeky web comic called Casey and Andy? This strip was very popular:
http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=39
Well it looks like the USB A connector has had a good ~20 year run.
That's a good point. And I'd much rather see USB-C emerge as the ubiquitous one than the special blue USB-A with the extra pins (paired with the special blue USB-B with extra pins, giant and ugly), or the weird Micro-USB connector that is extra wide.
The rule should be "if you see USB-A, assume USB 2.x or older; if you see USB-C, you can assume you get USB 3.x speeds."
By the time USB-C becomes ubiquitous, USB-D will be introduced and the whole thing starts all over again.
Unlikely. Everyone's tired of the shifting standards and everyone is ready to take a break and let USB-C become ubiquitous.
USB-C allows the full bandwidth of USB 3.1 to be used, allows enough power to run a real laptop, and has a well-designed connector (good connection, and the only USB connector that is symmetric so there is no "upside-down", it works either way). Also when USB-C becomes ubiquitous, you will only need a cable with USB-C on both ends; you won't need a cable with an A connector on one end and a B connector on the other end. In short, USB-C is a compelling new standard and the industry is driving toward it.
At this time there just isn't anything left that USB-C cannot do, which would require a new connector. People are saying that USB-C will be a standard for the next 20 years. That's a long time in technology, so I don't know if it will last 20 years, but it will certainly last 5 to 10 years.
It's the support for commercial applications people actually want to use, without having to compromise with shitty FOSS alternatives. Linux is a pain in the ass in that regard.
I've been running Linux for a bunch of years now and I'm content with the FOSS stuff. I buy Windows games on the Steam store sometimes, and I can imagine someone really needing an audio workstation or a video editor or something. But the basics (email, web, watching videos, word processor, spreadsheet, etc) are all solid.
That said I am willing to pay money for Linux software, if anyone would bother to sell any. I bought the legal video codecs pack and the DVD player from Fluendo and I'd buy a video editor or whatever.
I agree the new macbooks seem overpriced, but what's the alternative?
For me: Linux on decent hardware. All my desktop computers are AMD (for the price/performance and because I hate Intel) but I do have a ThinkPad notebook. Good keyboard, good touchpad, good screen, docking station, it's all-around good.
Linux hasn't been difficult to install for years now. In fact, if you have the technical skills to install Windows, you can install Linux, and you are likely to have an easier time. The exception would be wacky brand-new hardware; trying to cope with Linux kernel drivers is still a pain. But for my ThinkPad, everything Just Works with Linux, no special effort needed. Just boot from the installer USB flash drive and oh hey, you are in a GUI desktop with wifi and network and audio and graphics all working.
How are workers supposed to dig into the roads to install cables, lay need sewer lines/etc?
It's a different basic idea. I'm not sure how wise the idea is, but I can definitively tell you that they have thought about your concerns.
Here's how a solar roadway install would go:
First, dig up the old road, and install a mounting frame for the modular panels. Along one side of the road is a special underground service tunnel, and bundles of heavy cables run along that; this is the electrical bus, which lets multiple solar panels aggregate their output. Also in the special tunnel is the designed drainage, so that when it rains there is some place for the rain to go, and it is possible to install electric pumps to make sure the rain goes where it needs to go. The web site calls this the "Cable Corridor". One of the claimed benefits is this lets electrical transmission wires be conveniently underground by the roadway, instead of up on poles where winds can bring them down.
http://www.solarroadways.com/Home/Specifics
If one of the solar road modules is damaged, or just stops working correctly, that one module is removed and replaced with another off-the-shelf module. The initial install will cost more than an ordinary road, and the modules cost more than an equivalent volume of asphalt or concrete, but the labor of swapping a single module is going to be massively less than repaving a pothole. I reckon that to fix one panel you would just need one or two people and a pickup truck; for fixing a pothole in a normal roadway you would need a digging machine, asphalt machine, steamroller machine, and people to drive all the machines.
The surface of the modules is textured glass: textured to make it less slippery. One of my questions is whether the texture will be ground down and polished away after a few years of heavy use, leaving a horribly slick and dangerous glass surface. Another of my questions is how often the mounting frame under the road will need repair or replacement... it's simple to swap out modules, but not so simple to pull all the modules, dig up the frame, and lay a new one.
If the solar modules last longer than asphalt, this may turn out to be a much better way to go, but that seems like an incredibly big if.
It's also not clear to me why the solar modules should be the road, rather than a roof mounted high over the road, with sloped sides to keep rain and snow from accumulating on the roof. Why melt snow off the road when you can keep it off with a roof?
After I read up on their web site, I did some math, and I determined that according to their numbers, each solar module will make something like $2 worth of electricity per month. I don't imagine the lifetime of the modules will ever be long enough that they would pay for themselves. So this is a good idea only if the reduced labor costs of swapping modules (vs. repaving a conventional road) work out to a net savings. Best to treat the free electricity as a small bonus, rather than gushing about how if 100% of all roadways were replaced with this technology, it could power the entire USA for free. And the part on their web page where they actually propose rewiring everyone's homes to run on DC power makes me wonder if these guys have practical engineering experience or are just pure ivory-tower types in love with a pretty theory.
I guess if massive mass production occurs of these modules, the cost could come down a bit. If the mass-produced panels are cheap enough, if they last long enough, and if the cost of the initial install isn't too horrible, these might be economic. If, if, if.
(a) Appeal to authority. Facts are true or they aren't, and the majority opinion of scientists doesn't affect that.
(b) Catastrophism was proposed by J. Harlen Bretz as an explanation of the geologic features of the Channelled Scablands in Washington state. Basically he mapped out a bunch of geologic features and proposed that they were created by a catastrophic event: the unleashing of a tremendous volume of water that carved out new geologic features in a matter of days.
He was completely dismissed as a crackpot when he proposed it; not just wrong, but also not qualified to have any opinions on geology. The accepted dogma of the time was that everything in geology takes geologic time, not just most things (a strict form of uniformitarianism). 40 years later, his theories became accepted as correct by the mainstream geology community.
P.S. The modern view of uniformitarianism in geology is that most of the time things change slowly as they have all along, but sometimes catastrophic events like a megaflood or a volcanic eruption or a meteor impact can have a sudden effect. This just seems like common sense to me, but I guess the strict form of uniformitarianism seemed like common sense in 1923.