It has been informally suggested that Neanderthals were more robust than sapiens sapiens and that this could have been an early advantage - but once we invented the fire-hardened pointed stick and got good at using it, this ceased to matter. Bruce Chatwin speculated that the persistent "spearman" legends - Perseus and Andromeda, St. George, various dragon slayers - go back a long way to when the tribe was protected from predators by young men with spears, who enjoyed high status.
I think the evidence is that while early civilised human beings were smaller and weaker than hunter-gatherers, this is no longer true (at least in the West).
It's not quite as simple as that. Other manufacturers provide high-end notebook computers often with features that Macs lack, and some with quite expensive "designed" cases. But they do not get the market share. Aesthetics are terribly culture-dependent; we laugh at heavy Victorian furniture which then was the height of style, and we now look at the Demoiselles d'Avignon and just see a "modern painting" while most of our ancestors saw it as shocking and ugly.
Apple have persuaded people that their house style is the height of computer aesthetics, I doubt people will ever laugh at it, but we can safely assume that in 10 years time they will just be another bit of anonymous noughties computer junk, while something completely unexpected may be regarded as a style icon of the period.
Google are evolving a house style; the change will come when (if) that style is perceived as being more aesthetically successful than the Apple one, not the other way round.
One thing I find as time goes on is that I want smaller computers. I don't do serious graphics work on the move, and increasingly I find myself using a netbook more than my thin and light laptop which replaced my large screen laptop. Any of these can be plugged into a large monitor when needed, and currently I only ever need a DVD writer for things that will be installed to legacy machines.
The thing I want is quite simple: a Nokia web tablet but with a Bluetooth connection to a very small, very simple phone handset that has dialling buttons and makes calls. I want to be able to use this with the actual phone safely in a bag or inner pocket. A handset the size of the Toshiba G450 would be ideal. If the thing could also be used as an occasional mouse, that would be perfect.
Here in the UK the huge overreaction has spawned a child protection industry which, while making promotion opportunities for civil servants, has created a climate in which people will no longer intervene to stop children fighting or warn children about danger in case the children accuse the adults of "inappropriate behaviour".
A society which genuinely wanted to protect children would do things like reduce speed limits in built up areas to 10mph and imprison people who drive while talking on mobile phones - because the proponents of the legislation claim that any level of intrusion is justified if "a single child is saved".
Interestingly, the hysteria is driven by tabloid newspapers who, on other pages, will be moaning about the "Nanny State" - but this Canadian case seems to be about "the evil scum didn't commit an offence! We must create one so that in future similar evil scum can be charged with something!"
I am an idiot whose R&D career started in Diesel engine design and development, and who can probably bore the pants off you explaining the pros and cons of common rail, electronically controlled injection, swirl patterns, and a host of other technologies. I do know the difference between Diesel's original patent and the 4-valve, electronically timed injection, intercooled, variable vane turbocharged engine that powers my car. But, at the end of the day, they are still bits of metal banging around powered by burning oil. And I am still capable of telling m from M, and milliwatts from Megawatts.
You completely and utterly miss my point, which is that despite all the research into particle physics, nuclear energy and associated technologies, we are still unable to produce in volume a reliable, packaged, nuclear powered standby generator (despite proposed designs by e.g. Toshiba.) We are currently in the absurd position that when the oil runs out we won't be able to do advanced particle physics. If that doesn't suggest to you that we have been fricking around when we should have been working on better reactors, you are an even bigger numskull than your post suggests.
Is that actually they still have to rely on backup Diesels. It takes technology over 100 years old to keep the LHC running in a power outage. Schroedinger did his best work over 80 years ago. The Manhattan project was successful over 60 years ago. Yet we still have to rely on lumps of metal being banged around by crude chemical combustion to provide backup power for cutting edge research.
No mod points, sadly, for a brilliant post. But I can't help noting that Tove Jansson's (Swedish speaking Finnish) Moomins would soon convert the US Army into tree-hugging hippies.
Those bulbs are still three times less efficient than CFLs, not 30% but 300%. And if you believe that "a better and more efficient technology will win on its own merrit[sic]", remember you are talking about a world in which even 90% of the inhabitants of the developed countries are incapable of understanding a simple efficiency calculation. Sometimes people are so incapable of making a rational decision that you have to do it for them.
I am a systems architect. I've been a systems architect on and off for 25 years. During that time my job title has included Engineering Director, CFO, Systems Manager and CIO, depending on the size of company I've worked for.
Would you call someone who designs aircraft engines a mechanic? Would you call someone who designs central heating boilers a plumber? Would you call someone who runs a team working on ALU design at Intel an electrician?
My point is that nowadays IT is actually a trade, and mostly attracts the sort of people who in the past would have become plumbers, electricians and mechanics. Which is not to knock them, because these are essential and valuable trades, but basically they implement what other people have designed and specified. Programmers who are not just coders, systems designers, user interface designers - these are creative professions.
In the UK we have a terrible tradition of confusing professionals with tradesmen, caused by our emphasis on "administrative" skills. We've just had the Government dismiss their principal expert on drugs because he dared to disagree with the irrational "omg smelling cannabis kills you I need a stiff drink or five before I can go back to work" culture of the Government and the Civil Service. In a properly organised world we would sack the Government for lying to us, but in the mind of the Govt., Prof. Nutt's status is about that of a plumber. The point is that you go to tradesmen for advice on implementation of what you want to do, but you go to professionals to tell you what to do in the first place. You somehow need to get back to that position (I say you. I hope to retire in 5-6 years; then it will be someone else's problem. For now, I am quite happy being a software architect, because that is actually what I do.
I am being quite serious here. Mobile devices need good battery life, and there is a limit to what can be done with batteries and screens. If you need an anti-virus program, you are using more power and the battery life is shorter: end of story. Forget whether Apple is Gandalf or Sauron, their attitude is 100% correct.
Going further, I have absolutely no patience with people who hack iPhones. A phone is an appliance connected to a public asset - EM bandwidth. People using public assets have a duty of care, and it's the failure of duty of care (tragedy of the Commons) that has done a lot of damage to society.
What I do on my own local network is my affair, but I think increasingly we should have a reasonable expectation that anything connected to a public network is properly secured and maintained, just like (in the UK at least) we test cars annually to check they are safe on the road. I'm afraid that the Wild West days of the Internet are increasingly over - and the excesses of some people is bringing down an overreaction.
Over the next 20 years we have to find a way to put the genie back in the bottle without killing the genie or spoiling the bottle. The politicians will try to screw this up. But the rest of us need to realise that we need to grow up too - we need to understand that if we want a reliable public internet and mobile phone system, we need to stop treating people who act irresponsibly as if their behaviour was acceptable or clever. Otherwise anti-virus and anti-malware software will continue to eat up too many of our CPU cycles, shorten the lives of our hard drives, and cause increasing frustration to those of us who actually need to earn a living, and have to use the Internet and the phone system to do it.
The Government loves Rupert Murdoch and the media companies - I must kill filesharers! But the Government loves Vodafone, O2 and Three - I must protect the revenue of the telephone companies! There is a conflict in my Prime Directive!
This is a troll, right? I live in the area, and believe me, I do not go to either in December. Bath has one of the most polluted city centers in the UK, recently spoiled by a ghastly US-style shopping mall, and Stonehenge is the most dismal reason for getting rid of the Environment Agency quango you can imagine; a long history of mismanagement at the greedy hands of the Heritage Industry. They are tolerable from May to October, but that's about it.
If you check Dante's Inferno (around 1300AD,long before the French Revolution) you will find that they had lanes on the bridges and that people had to keep right. The same goes at sea.
However, the idea that a majority drive on the right may be doomed in the long term. Much of Africa, Japan, the UK and India drive on the left. (Australians and Maltese famously drive in the shade.) A lot will depend on who (if...) develops a car economy first, China or India.
The people who "read" his papers (some English readers may remember the joke in Porridge) do so to have their prejudices confirmed, not to find things out. Murdoch is trying to keep his readers happy by showing them that people are prepared to pay to have his views presented to them, thus providing additional prejudice confirmation. If other people are prepared to spend money to find out that Palin or Bach are wonderful and not at all dysfunctional in any way whatever, and that Obama is a racist and the Anti-Christ, then holding these views clearly has value. It's like the people who think that the Daily Telegraph is a reliable newspaper because it's still printed in big, impressive broadsheet format, and not all because the Barclay brothers don't think paper has a future and don't want to invest in new presses.
You've just described it. If you try and manage all the R&D and ensure everything fits together and is optimised - like the "pragmatometer" in C S Lewis's dystopic NICE - you kill creativity and slow everything down. Theoretical physics - there's a lot of duplication in different universities. Are you going to set up a supercommittee to eliminate it? Congratulations, you just killed physics.
If Google shareholders take windfall profits now and try to mature the company early, they will be killing exactly what makes it innovative. It is not in the long term interests of Google to do that. Remember long term? Before we had day traders and similar idiots trying to turn everything into a casino, we had companies like IBM that were hugely innovative and came up with things like relational databases. Real innovation requires long term commitment and a great deal of luck. You make your own luck by funding people like Cobb, or Mandelbrot, and wait for them to lay golden eggs. Can't do that if the shareholders are whining that they want all their (unearned) profits out, now.
The comms of the time and the capabilities of mainframes were pathetic, and a basic PC did not need to be any more complex than a dumb terminal. Put simply, the bandwidth of a POTS modem was anything between 300 and 9600 baud depending on how dedicated your line was, how far it had to route and so on. Even the cheapest 6502 processor could redraw a screen faster than you could over a modem.
There are some projects that can only be undertaken by large resources: the reclamation of the Netherlands and the East Anglian Fens from the sea being successful examples. The return on investment can be very large. But the effect of drainage is to reduce soil levels, so land that started up above sea level ends up below (you can see this very easily in East Anglia, where the drainage canals are often well above field levels.) East Anglia and the Netherlands have amazing hydrological systems to prevent flooding, which are well maintained, and I imagine that abandoning, for instance, Cambridgeshire and Befordshire to the sea might not be a sound idea financially. I don't know any more about New Orleans that a few articles in Sci Am have told me, but it looks as if the root cause of the problem is that large amounts of land and harbor have been reclaimed in ways that are perhaps hydrologically unwise, and the US Government decided to stop funding the protection measures. Now, what about all the people who have roots in the area from before the hydrological works started? They were presumably perfectly safe until the changed pattern of water movement created the conditions for a disaster. They at least should be able to claim against the developers and the Government who created the problem in the first place. And what of the people who moved into the area on the basis of misrepresentation that the system was safe?
Me? I live 65 metres above sea level and my backyard drops two metres to a drainage ditch. The prospect of flooding does not alarm me. But some of the most agriculturally productive parts of our area (and the Fens, and the Netherlands) are potentially liable to flooding, and in 30 years some of them may be abandoned to the sea. This will result in large economic loss. The decision on when and what to abandon will have to be taken on ruthless economic grounds. The decision in the US seems to have been taken on the grounds that (a) isn't this war expensive? and (b) why are we paying to protect poor people who vote Democrat? People do have a right to expect better of the Governments that they elect and pay taxes to.
Obviously not. If you did you would know he always credits his sources in depth and explains the historical development of his thinking. He often draws out features of graphical presentation of data and gives them simplifying names to provide a framework, but he does not claim originality.
He is not suing Microsoft, and has done absolutely nothing wrong, And your post is a simple troll.
The EU plus the developed Far East is a lot bigger than the US, and the patent system is not so broken. Avoiding the US market involves increased costs of localisation, but with FOSS apps people will do that for you if they want it. It also involves considerably decreased costs of litigation.
For the two people who don't know already, Finnish and Korean are related languages. Culturally, Samsung and Nokia have more in common than they do with US companies. And they have a potential non-US market twice the size of the US. Being #1 in the US looks good - in the Wall Street Journal - but it does not necessarily make good business sense.
Mandelson is gay but for years wouldn't admit it and used his media contacts to ensure that it wasn't reported. In fact he is (more or less) Rupert Murdoch's mole in the Labour Party, and he is probably proposing this in a last-ditch attempt to get the Sun back on side. Claims that he has also sold his soul to the Devil are categorically untrue. When asked for confirmation, all Satan would say was "we do have standards down here, dear boy."
Well, the Met is probably the most corrupt police force in the UK, the one that manages to kill innocent bystanders, the one that manages to shoot innocent people and then the person in charge gets promoted instead of being jailed, the one that has the most complaints against it and the lowest rate of action on complaints, the one whose last head had to be fired by the Mayor because the Government wouldn't do it, the one which had to be investigated for corruption by another police force - so naturally you wouldn't want anyone else dealing with serious organised crime.
Thankfully I live in Somerset, where we have a police force that doesn't try to imitate the worst excesses of US cop shows.
The article is wrong. Mhyrvold just hired one of Blumenthal's staff, not the man himself. It doesn't properly credit Blumenthal or explain the extent to which Mhyrvold is just copying someone else's work, by, in effect, hiring one of his developers.
Is Ruth Kimber, as documented on Channel 4 with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Ruth produces (among other things) beef, veal and milk. Her calves get an outdoor life (no crating). She argues, and I tend to support this, that in the wild most ruminants cannot grow to maturity (otherwise you get population surges and mass starvation.) By producing calves and only allowing a certain number to survive to be adults, we actually mimic the natural environment with us as the top level predator.
I personally do not have a problem with vegans. I understand (but don't totally agree with) you because I am a fan of biodiversity, and because I love our Somerset and Wiltshire (UK) landscape which has been formed by dairy and sheep farming. But I completely agree that anyone who calls themselves a vegetarian and drinks milk or eats cheese is either self-deluding or is turning a dietary preference into an ethic. (I am also very much against mass consumption of beef from intensive farms - we are careful to eat a "sustainable" level of meat from local sources, which is once every couple of weeks for beef/veal.)
This is what is technically termed a gross oversimplification. Just like today, until the end of the nineteenth century education was a very expensive habit and only the rich could afford it. (Even so the universities did try to widen the base, which is how a relatively poor boy like Isaac Newton managed to get to Trinity.) It's true that youngest sons might get safely parked in a monastery in case the others got killed in a battle, but competition between monasteries and universities meant that, just like Cambridge and Harvard today, they were on the lookout for talent that could expand their reputation. A rich abbot was no use if people laughed at his ignorance.
The Bible being translated in Latin was called the Vulgate - meaning "ordinary language", equivalent to being translated into English today. And there was much internal competition over doctrine, with the Dominicans (for instance) upholding the secular power and property of the Church and the Franciscans supporting holy poverty and the rights of the poor. The gap between Dominicans and Franciscans was much, much bigger than that between Republicans and Democrats. If you want a period when debate is suppressed by the media and public opinion is limited to a very narrow discourse, the first decade of the 21st century in the US of A trumps the Middle Ages, almost every time.
Er, no. The reason that houses mostly don't have all the features that cars have is because houses are much bigger and the costs are much higher, also houses have to operate 24/7 and cars don't. Most people simply can't afford it, or they prefer the old ways because, let's face it, they are more aesthetically attractive. I've just moved from a house in a conservation area to one with modern tech, and although I really like the convenience, I miss my open fireplaces, hardwood windows and solid stone walls. Kitchen technology is very conservative because:
It has to be used by all kinds of people including many with little education
Training is mainly passed down from generation to generation
It needs to be simple and reliable to be cost effective
There are kitchen machines that work better than traditional technology. Panasonic breadmakers, microwave ovens, fan ovens, force-sensing food processors. But traditional technology has generally evolved around human factors and has taken thousands of years to do it. There is a lot of knowledge hidden in those apparently simple tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the evidence is that while early civilised human beings were smaller and weaker than hunter-gatherers, this is no longer true (at least in the West).
Apple have persuaded people that their house style is the height of computer aesthetics, I doubt people will ever laugh at it, but we can safely assume that in 10 years time they will just be another bit of anonymous noughties computer junk, while something completely unexpected may be regarded as a style icon of the period.
Google are evolving a house style; the change will come when (if) that style is perceived as being more aesthetically successful than the Apple one, not the other way round.
The thing I want is quite simple: a Nokia web tablet but with a Bluetooth connection to a very small, very simple phone handset that has dialling buttons and makes calls. I want to be able to use this with the actual phone safely in a bag or inner pocket. A handset the size of the Toshiba G450 would be ideal. If the thing could also be used as an occasional mouse, that would be perfect.
A society which genuinely wanted to protect children would do things like reduce speed limits in built up areas to 10mph and imprison people who drive while talking on mobile phones - because the proponents of the legislation claim that any level of intrusion is justified if "a single child is saved".
Interestingly, the hysteria is driven by tabloid newspapers who, on other pages, will be moaning about the "Nanny State" - but this Canadian case seems to be about "the evil scum didn't commit an offence! We must create one so that in future similar evil scum can be charged with something!"
You completely and utterly miss my point, which is that despite all the research into particle physics, nuclear energy and associated technologies, we are still unable to produce in volume a reliable, packaged, nuclear powered standby generator (despite proposed designs by e.g. Toshiba.) We are currently in the absurd position that when the oil runs out we won't be able to do advanced particle physics. If that doesn't suggest to you that we have been fricking around when we should have been working on better reactors, you are an even bigger numskull than your post suggests.
Is that actually they still have to rely on backup Diesels. It takes technology over 100 years old to keep the LHC running in a power outage. Schroedinger did his best work over 80 years ago. The Manhattan project was successful over 60 years ago. Yet we still have to rely on lumps of metal being banged around by crude chemical combustion to provide backup power for cutting edge research.
No mod points, sadly, for a brilliant post. But I can't help noting that Tove Jansson's (Swedish speaking Finnish) Moomins would soon convert the US Army into tree-hugging hippies.
Those bulbs are still three times less efficient than CFLs, not 30% but 300%. And if you believe that "a better and more efficient technology will win on its own merrit[sic]", remember you are talking about a world in which even 90% of the inhabitants of the developed countries are incapable of understanding a simple efficiency calculation. Sometimes people are so incapable of making a rational decision that you have to do it for them.
Would you call someone who designs aircraft engines a mechanic? Would you call someone who designs central heating boilers a plumber? Would you call someone who runs a team working on ALU design at Intel an electrician?
My point is that nowadays IT is actually a trade, and mostly attracts the sort of people who in the past would have become plumbers, electricians and mechanics. Which is not to knock them, because these are essential and valuable trades, but basically they implement what other people have designed and specified. Programmers who are not just coders, systems designers, user interface designers - these are creative professions.
In the UK we have a terrible tradition of confusing professionals with tradesmen, caused by our emphasis on "administrative" skills. We've just had the Government dismiss their principal expert on drugs because he dared to disagree with the irrational "omg smelling cannabis kills you I need a stiff drink or five before I can go back to work" culture of the Government and the Civil Service. In a properly organised world we would sack the Government for lying to us, but in the mind of the Govt., Prof. Nutt's status is about that of a plumber. The point is that you go to tradesmen for advice on implementation of what you want to do, but you go to professionals to tell you what to do in the first place. You somehow need to get back to that position (I say you. I hope to retire in 5-6 years; then it will be someone else's problem. For now, I am quite happy being a software architect, because that is actually what I do.
Going further, I have absolutely no patience with people who hack iPhones. A phone is an appliance connected to a public asset - EM bandwidth. People using public assets have a duty of care, and it's the failure of duty of care (tragedy of the Commons) that has done a lot of damage to society.
What I do on my own local network is my affair, but I think increasingly we should have a reasonable expectation that anything connected to a public network is properly secured and maintained, just like (in the UK at least) we test cars annually to check they are safe on the road. I'm afraid that the Wild West days of the Internet are increasingly over - and the excesses of some people is bringing down an overreaction.
Over the next 20 years we have to find a way to put the genie back in the bottle without killing the genie or spoiling the bottle. The politicians will try to screw this up. But the rest of us need to realise that we need to grow up too - we need to understand that if we want a reliable public internet and mobile phone system, we need to stop treating people who act irresponsibly as if their behaviour was acceptable or clever. Otherwise anti-virus and anti-malware software will continue to eat up too many of our CPU cycles, shorten the lives of our hard drives, and cause increasing frustration to those of us who actually need to earn a living, and have to use the Internet and the phone system to do it.
Head explodes.
This is a troll, right? I live in the area, and believe me, I do not go to either in December. Bath has one of the most polluted city centers in the UK, recently spoiled by a ghastly US-style shopping mall, and Stonehenge is the most dismal reason for getting rid of the Environment Agency quango you can imagine; a long history of mismanagement at the greedy hands of the Heritage Industry. They are tolerable from May to October, but that's about it.
However, the idea that a majority drive on the right may be doomed in the long term. Much of Africa, Japan, the UK and India drive on the left. (Australians and Maltese famously drive in the shade.) A lot will depend on who (if...) develops a car economy first, China or India.
The people who "read" his papers (some English readers may remember the joke in Porridge) do so to have their prejudices confirmed, not to find things out. Murdoch is trying to keep his readers happy by showing them that people are prepared to pay to have his views presented to them, thus providing additional prejudice confirmation. If other people are prepared to spend money to find out that Palin or Bach are wonderful and not at all dysfunctional in any way whatever, and that Obama is a racist and the Anti-Christ, then holding these views clearly has value. It's like the people who think that the Daily Telegraph is a reliable newspaper because it's still printed in big, impressive broadsheet format, and not all because the Barclay brothers don't think paper has a future and don't want to invest in new presses.
If Google shareholders take windfall profits now and try to mature the company early, they will be killing exactly what makes it innovative. It is not in the long term interests of Google to do that. Remember long term? Before we had day traders and similar idiots trying to turn everything into a casino, we had companies like IBM that were hugely innovative and came up with things like relational databases. Real innovation requires long term commitment and a great deal of luck. You make your own luck by funding people like Cobb, or Mandelbrot, and wait for them to lay golden eggs. Can't do that if the shareholders are whining that they want all their (unearned) profits out, now.
That isn't true now.
Me? I live 65 metres above sea level and my backyard drops two metres to a drainage ditch. The prospect of flooding does not alarm me. But some of the most agriculturally productive parts of our area (and the Fens, and the Netherlands) are potentially liable to flooding, and in 30 years some of them may be abandoned to the sea. This will result in large economic loss. The decision on when and what to abandon will have to be taken on ruthless economic grounds. The decision in the US seems to have been taken on the grounds that (a) isn't this war expensive? and (b) why are we paying to protect poor people who vote Democrat? People do have a right to expect better of the Governments that they elect and pay taxes to.
He is not suing Microsoft, and has done absolutely nothing wrong, And your post is a simple troll.
For the two people who don't know already, Finnish and Korean are related languages. Culturally, Samsung and Nokia have more in common than they do with US companies. And they have a potential non-US market twice the size of the US. Being #1 in the US looks good - in the Wall Street Journal - but it does not necessarily make good business sense.
Mandelson is gay but for years wouldn't admit it and used his media contacts to ensure that it wasn't reported. In fact he is (more or less) Rupert Murdoch's mole in the Labour Party, and he is probably proposing this in a last-ditch attempt to get the Sun back on side. Claims that he has also sold his soul to the Devil are categorically untrue. When asked for confirmation, all Satan would say was "we do have standards down here, dear boy."
Thankfully I live in Somerset, where we have a police force that doesn't try to imitate the worst excesses of US cop shows.
The article is wrong. Mhyrvold just hired one of Blumenthal's staff, not the man himself. It doesn't properly credit Blumenthal or explain the extent to which Mhyrvold is just copying someone else's work, by, in effect, hiring one of his developers.
I personally do not have a problem with vegans. I understand (but don't totally agree with) you because I am a fan of biodiversity, and because I love our Somerset and Wiltshire (UK) landscape which has been formed by dairy and sheep farming. But I completely agree that anyone who calls themselves a vegetarian and drinks milk or eats cheese is either self-deluding or is turning a dietary preference into an ethic. (I am also very much against mass consumption of beef from intensive farms - we are careful to eat a "sustainable" level of meat from local sources, which is once every couple of weeks for beef/veal.)
The Bible being translated in Latin was called the Vulgate - meaning "ordinary language", equivalent to being translated into English today. And there was much internal competition over doctrine, with the Dominicans (for instance) upholding the secular power and property of the Church and the Franciscans supporting holy poverty and the rights of the poor. The gap between Dominicans and Franciscans was much, much bigger than that between Republicans and Democrats. If you want a period when debate is suppressed by the media and public opinion is limited to a very narrow discourse, the first decade of the 21st century in the US of A trumps the Middle Ages, almost every time.
Scientology is a child of its time, not the past.
There are kitchen machines that work better than traditional technology. Panasonic breadmakers, microwave ovens, fan ovens, force-sensing food processors. But traditional technology has generally evolved around human factors and has taken thousands of years to do it. There is a lot of knowledge hidden in those apparently simple tools.