I've wondered similar things. In the form of a question, I might put it:
What is the long-term plan to integrate Bitcoin with traditional banking and financial systems?
I understand that a core principle of Bitcoin is to provide an (anonymous) alternative to such systems, but something like a Bitcoin currency exchange clearly qualifies as a financial institution within a particular jurisdiction. If Bitcoin starts becoming successful (widely used), you won't be able to avoid scrutiny and regulation. This isn't a bad thing, either: many financial regulations are a good thing, protecting individual depositors/investors/traders from fraud or malfeasance (e.g. insider trading or an exchange operator giving themselves a trading advantage). Even while Bitcoins remain anonymous currency (like cash), institutions that store/exchange Bitcoins will probably need to be regulated. I, personally, have wanted to join the Bitcoin economy but was turned off by the amateurish and non-reputable state of current exchanges. There are no guarantees, no safeguards, no oversight, no insurance, and no straightforward way for me to establish the credibility of any of these exchanges. Are there plans to change this?
Well I know it's cheating to RTFA, but most of the complaints in the comments right now are totally missing the mark, since their worries are addressed in the actual blog post. There's plenty enough that's wrong with this idea without imagining problems that are not there or haven't been addressed in this idea. (And it is just an off-the-wall idea right now.)
Let me address some complaints:
1. Why hide the URL bar, it gives useful information! The proposal actually still keeps all the URL information. However instead of it always sitting at the top of the browser chrome, it's attached to the webpage, and scrolls up/down with it so that you can scroll it out of the way when you want. There is some logic to this: you normally want to look at the URL when you first land on a page. After that you don't need it as much. (Yes, there are exceptions.) The proposal is in fact to add more information to keep the user informed. (A possible downside is information overload.)
2. Why is Mozilla copying Google? From what I can tell this isn't inspired from Google, other than in the sense that there is a general trend to reduce chrome (and not just in browsers). The Google proposal is to auto-hide the URL bar, and have it popup when needed. This proposal is to conceptually attach the url to the page rather than to the browser chrome.
3. How am I going to enter new URLs without the URL bar? The proposal is that you will either edit the URL that is at the top of the current page, or use a "browse" command where you'll be able to type or paste an URL.
Now, having addressed (partially) those immediate concerns, let's ask whether this is a good idea or not. Personally, I'm in favor of at least designing and testing new, crazy UI ideas. It's the only way that we can discover new and better ways to interact with out computer. So I'm supportive of having a discussion, and I don't think changing the URL bar should be off the table. That having been said, the proposal has a number of problems:
1. It heavily draws upon Jef Raskin's design rule of "there should be only one way to accomplish a certain atomic task". The idea is that by having only way, good, way to do something, users can train and habitualize and accomplish the task faster and without thinking. It's true that psych research has shown that having options (including different ways to do the same thing) subtly slows down a person's response time and thus can jar their thought processes. However I haven't seen any conclusive research showing that this is significant enough to warrant having a "only one way" rule--since it denies (for instance) power users the ability to learn keyboard shortcuts, can make it more difficult for accessibility or even just for people of various abilities (some people can't type well but can click on icons well enough). The design in the blog post favors a natural-language text entry system (basically the Ubiquity system that exists for Firefox). Personally, I quite like that mode of controlling a computer, but I suspect the vast majority of people would view this kind of command-entry (much like a commandline, though somewhat more forgiving) as being very intimidating. Overall, I'm not convinced that having only "one way" to control the interface makes sense.
2. The author takes it as a given that we should aim to reduce application chrome. Again, I personally agree with this from both an aesthetic standpoint, and from a usability standpoint. But then again, that's because I'm happy spending the time to memorize keyboard shortcuts and other tricks (e.g. instaling mouse gestures) so that I can remove the chrome and concentrate on the content. But, again, I don't think this really applies to everyone.
I use multi-monitor setups (2 monitors at work; 4 at home), but still prefer single-window mode. Nothing stops the user from stretching the single window across the multiple monitors, after all.
The thing that frustrates me about GIMP's floating palettes is that if I have other windows open, then in order to bring GIMP fully to the front, I need to click through all of the various sub-windows. I've learned to work around it (e.g. in KDE I can middle-click other windows to push them fully behind the GIMP; generally I try to put GIMP on its own desktop)... but sometimes I'll forget my tricks and end up with the GIMP's windows annoyingly mixed in with other things I'm working on. It would be much simpler to have all the GIMP windows behave as a single entity.
In general I dislike floating palettes because they can obscure the thing you're working on. Docking them just seems cleaner if you've got the screen real estate.
Of course it's a matter of preference and work style. Whatever makes a particular user more productive is right for them. So hopefully it will remain an option in GIMP. I think Inkscape's model is pretty good, incidentally. It starts as a single-window, and all the palettes open up as docked palettes. However there's are keyboard shortcuts for quickly going into fullscreen mode, and for quickly toggling palettes visible/hide. So you can get a huge canvas and still have quick-access to tools. In Inkscape, the palettes can also be torn off from the main window and floated wherever you want (inside or outside of main window), with it remembering the location you selected. This, I think, gives you the best of both worlds: the default is structured and contained, but you can easily customize it as needed (dragging often-used palettes to a second monitor, etc.). It works quite well.
To recap the reason why current 3D implementations are lacking (and thus give some people a headache)... Humans use at least 5 tricks to determine the three-dimensional makeup of a scene:
1. Focal depth: based on how much the eye's lens has to focus
2. Convergence: based on the slight differences in pointing of the two eyes to a target
3. Stereopsis (static parallax): based on the slight differences between the left and right eye images
4. Motion parallax: based on the different displacements/motions of objects at different distances (e.g. as you move your head)
5. Visual inference: reconstructing using cues like occlusion, lighting, etc.
In the real world, all 5 of those systems work in concert, giving you a consistent understanding of your environment. The problem with modern 3D implementations is that they only trick you using only two, or maybe three, of the above. For instance "3D glasses" are showing you different left/right images, creating fake stereopsis, but the focal distance is still "to the screen" and doesn't match the apparent parallax-based distance to objects. So your brain is rightly confused because the various systems are giving conflicting answers. Amazingly our brains have no problem looking at two-dimensional images like pictures and conventional movies: in such cases 1-4 don't work, and our brains instead just use #5 to fully reconstruct/guess at the three-dimensional nature of the scene. A few optical illusions notwithstanding, this works remarkably well.
What's presented in the above video is fooling your brain using motion parallax. This is neat, but because the image is still flat, your other brain systems (1-3) will be giving a different answer and so the illusion won't be perfect.
In principle we could combine techniques to make for a more convincing sort of 3D. E.g. combine motion parallax (eye tracking) with stereopsis (3D glasses). But it won't be truly convincing (and thus headache-free) until we fully reconstruct the three-dimensional light-field that should properly be emanating from the virtual objects. Doing this requires some very good holography, to fully reconstruct the required light waveforms, or something like anisotropic pixels that can control their emission as a function of viewing angle. In the meantime, 3D will remain a bit of a gimmick outside of some niche applications.
Hm. When thought about this way, the "escalating version numbers" bother me much less.
When you think about it, I have tons of software on my machine that goes through version numbers without me noticing. I do my "apt-get upgrade" and all my software is just a little bit better. If Firefox really goes to this "milestone model" then it will be like that also. Rather than me getting excited about a new release, it will just appear in my normal updates and I won't pay it much heed.
From a user perspective this is probably better. Fixes and features get to me sooner and more reliably. My browser changes more incrementally rather than in big jumps. (This is a debatable advantage, since many users hate it when their software slowly changes as they update.) I don't have to think as much about Firefox releases.
This may, however, be a net loss from a hype/advertising point of view. Rather than getting all kinds of jazzy articles about the "next awesome version of Firefox", please will be less excited and it will just become "oh, yeah, there were some bugfixes in the last milestone... whatever..." Time will tell, I suppose.
There is another huge difference. The argument outlined in the summary is only thinking at the level of individual people, especially lay-people (who are most disconnected from the endeavors). What happens if you think at the level of society as a whole? Well, then the difference between evidence-based belief and faith-based belief become more obvious.
Think first about how even an "expert scientist" knows certain things are true. They've studied their field, done a bunch of experiments, and so they've witnessed first-hand certain persuasive empirical facts. Yet, the scientific knowledge they have goes way beyond their personal research. They have in their minds a bunch of results and proofs from other scientists, that they accept as valid. (They are also aware of findings that they don't agree with.) They draw upon knowledge in other domains of science that they know little about: they trust the experts in those other fields. Calling all of this "faith" isn't quite right. It's more like "outsourcing" certain parts of your knowledge-discovery to others: delegating information-tasks to people you trust and then amalgamating the results into your worldview. Of course your final view of reality is only as good as all those inputs (plus your own experiments and reasoning)...
Now jump up to the macro/societal level. Although no individual scientist fully understands all of science, society as a whole understands a heck of a lot. And society as a whole is able to apply that knowledge to making useful, testable predictions and to making useful, tangible products (cars, jets, computers, etc.). This is a variant of the old "no single person knows how to make a pencil" thing. Although no individual scientist, or lay person, can fully understand all of the knowledge that we've accumulated, they can easily see outputs of that knowledge, and they can test sub-sets of that knowledge as much as they want, and so they can develop confidence in the overall knowledge-base and associated worldview. In a loose sense, you could say that although no individual understands science, the human race does.
By comparison, a faith-based description remains faith-based and without evidence even at the largest level. If you amalgamate all of society's evidence for a particular faith-claim (say, the existence of an unseen force/spirit/god), it's actually no different than a single-person's evidence. That is to say, even at a high level the argument remains faith: "you just need to believe this is true". So at the level of the human race, there is no understanding/knowledge, just faith.
The difference in how knowledge scales between the two cases is what gives rise to the operational differences (e.g. building jets versus... not building jets), and logical participants can thus decide between which worldview is a better match to reality, even though they don't fully understand all the cogs and gears in all the competing worldviews. So the participants don't need to rely on faith, they can use logic and inference to decide what is true.
Indeed. There are a lot of problems with just having the pointer just follow a person's eyes. Obviously there are applications in terms of accessibility (which appears to be the target market), but for the general user this would be painfully frustrating to use: people very frequently look at one part of the screen while typing/manipulating in some other window. There's also no way that using your eyes would be as easy and accurate as using a mouse (your eyes intentionally jitter about).
I'm disappointed that we haven't seen anything beyond a simple "directly control mouse pointer" implementation. There are so many more interesting things one could imagine. For instance a "focus follows eyes" like "focus follows mouse" would be interesting. (Not for a general user, mind you, but as an option for people who have a certain kind of workflow.) Something else I would love to see is a "smart snap-to". For instance if I'm looking at a given widget, and I move the mouse pointer from far away towards the widget I'm staring at, it could immediately "snap" onto that widget, so that I can easily click/interact with it. It would only work if calibrated correctly so that it isn't triggered during normal operations (e.g. I'm moving an object in a program, my eye focus is fairly close to the pointer, so it shouldn't snap annoyingly) and only exists as an 'accelerator' during big pointer movements. It could actually be implemented as a sort of region around my focus that has 'slower mouse acceleration' so that the pointer sorta gets trapped in that area (effectively creating a Fitt's Law "big target" where I'm looking), probably coupled with some context-awareness (e.g. only active when I'm looking at UI chrome, not movable elements within a program or the canvas of a drawing app...)
The devil is in the details, but I think there's a way to implement it where it would be helpful in many cases (the pointer magically moving where you wanted it to) without screwing up other cases (when you want to delicately move the mouse). I'm sure there are lots of other neat ways that eye-tracking and mouse movements could be ingeniously combined (when my eyes are searching around frantically, make the mouse pointer glow so that I can find it?)... a simple control of the mouse pointer doesn't sound great.
(One problem with the things I'm proposing is that they are so subtle and such small gains in productivity that they certainly wouldn't justify a cost much beyond what a webcam costs...)
Yes, Google can comfortably decry software patents because their business model is not dependent on them. But that's the point, isn't it?
Google's point of view deserves to be heard because it informs the debate. They are an example of a big software company innovating and making money without relying on software patents. This weakens the argument for software patents being absolutely necessary for economic progress in this sector. Moreover Google can make a compelling case for how they could innovate/produce more if software patents were not standing in their way.
Of course just because Google has a business model that doesn't rely on software patents doesn't mean that all software companies will be in the same position. (Certainly not all software companies can become advertising companies!) But that's fine, too: we hear the opinions of those companies who "rely" on software patents to remain viable. But Google's opinion is not invalidated just because they don't need patents; that is the very crux of why their opinion is relevant!
Besides, let us not forget that the primary question in this debate shouldn't be "what makes companies the most money?" We should be asking about what kind of wealth we want to generate in our society (money? innovation? health? happiness?), and then optimizing laws to achieve said goals. No matter what laws we enact, there will be some losers and some winners. The idea is to find the balance where the overall social gains are maximized. If we got rid of software patents, there would be losers (e.g. Microsoft), but possibly more winners (Google, all the small-time businesses, open source, etc.). Even within a "loser" things might not be so bad: some parts of Microsoft's business would suffer, but others might flourish (e.g. there is certainly a cost for Microsoft to have to defend itself against other's patents).
Indeed. Humans infer distances and thus reconstruct three-dimensional scenes from their two-dimensional retinas using at least five levels of measurement/processing:
1. Focal depth: based on how much the eye has to focus
2. Convergence: based on the slight differences in pointing of the two eyes
3. Stereoscopy: based on the slight differences between the left and right image
4. Parallax: the different displacements/motions of objects at different distances
5. Visual inference: reconstructing using cues like occlusion, lighting, etc.
When you watch a normal 2D movie, 1, 2, 3, and 4 don't work. So your brain relies entirely on #5. This turns out to work remarkably well, because our brains are quite good at inferring and guessing what the real 3D scene looks like. (For instance, whenever looking at faraway objects, this is pretty much all you have to work with.) Move-makers have also learned how to best frame shots to make things look 'right'. And at least 1, 2, and 3 agree with each other, so your eyes can simply focus on the theater's screen (it also helps that the screen is far away).
The various versions of "3D" try to trick you, but unfortunately they don't hit all 5 of the above and so this confuses your brain. A typical 'glasses' setup tricks you using #3, but now the position of objects as determined by #3 doesn't match 1 or 2, so your brain gets confused (tiredness and headaches ensue). And try as it might, it can't compensate (e.g. no matter how hard it tries, it can't bring out-of-focus things into focus). Really bad 3D (where things 'jump out' at you and whatnot) can even violate #5. Ultimately your brain isn't happy because half the signals are saying one thing (distance to the theater screen) and the other half are saying something else (object really close to you!).
Nintendo's 3DS apparently tries to use parallax to fool your brain, but again the effect won't be perfect, so your brain will be unhappy.
To be truly 3D, you would need to record, and then reproduce/project, the entire waveform (e.g. collect light from every angle impinging on your camera 'screen'). In principle holography can do this, but in practice we don't have good technology. Besides, this causes many other problems (e.g. every person in a theater sees a slightly different angle, that's not necessarily desirable). True 3D isn't going to be technologically feasible anytime soon. In the meantime, we will have only approximate 3D solutions... which it seems are actually worse than just allowing the person's brain to fill in the blanks.
His take on advertising also jumps to conclusions:
Advertisements would transform from a pervasive nuisance into something more like useful information. Advertisers would know so much about your lifestyle and preferences that you would only see ads that made perfect sense for your situation.
This is a fallacy I've tried to point out before. If advertisers know everything about you, that doesn't mean they will only show you ads for things you care about, or ads you find pleasant/funny/good. The point of advertising/marketing is to shift your purchasing behavior, and being pleasant will not always be the best way to achieve this. Ads that are repetitive, annoying, boring, or otherwise unpleasant may be "effective" from a marketing standpoint. E.g. people hate seeing the same commercial over and over again (sometimes more than once in a single commercial break!) but it's no accident: they know that they can increase brand recognition by searing their jingle/logo/etc. into your brain.
And advertisers have huge incentives to show you ads for things you "don't care about". In fact advertising things you really care about is mostly a waste: you're too well-informed and opinionated to sway. To bring up the stereotypical example: males may not care about tampons, but advertisers still want them to see tampon ads, because sooner or later that guy is going to have to buy tampons (e.g. his wife asks him to pick some up on the way home) and the company wants the guy's default, uninformed choice to be driven not by careful research but by advertising and brand loyalty.
Basically, the goals of the advertisers and the goals of the consumer are not aligned in any way.
The same is true of many of the other examples presented in the hypothetical. It's somewhat assumed that people will use the pervasive information in fairly logical and reasonable ways. But that's not how companies or people operate. Companies are effectively predatory. People are often illogical. For instance giving people more information doesn't always lead to better decisions. Studies have shown that people get overloaded and make sub-optimal decisions beyond a certain level.
Basically, the gains that are described as a result of "no privacy" would only occur if all the participants were very good, honest, smart, and balanced. But if you're using "very good, honest, smart, balanced people" as a starting axiom, then the "no privacy" thing isn't really necessary, since a good society will evolve in any case. The problem is that in reality people are variable, illogical, and somewhat selfish. We need to design societies that take into account human behavior, not societies that idealize it.
as I understand it, there's no good way of making high-quality naontubes in large batches. Is that still accurate?
It's a bit more complicated than that. Actually we now have a variety of very good procedures for making high-quality nanotubes in reasonably large quantities. You can buy carbon nanotubes quite easily now. The nanotubes are long, defect-free, and have low concentrations of impurities (e.g. catalyst). And one can make the nanotubes purely single-walled, or purely double-walled, or multi-walled. We have a high level of control. In these senses, you can certainly say that "high quality" tubes are a reality.
The problem is the purity of tube type. Carbon nanotubes of a given diameter come in a variety of types ("chirality"), depending on how orientation of the graphene network with relation to the tube axis. The various types have different properties: some are 'metallic', some are semiconducting. For some applications you don't care about tube type. For instance if you're loading nanotubes into a material as a strengthening agent, then all nanotubes are equally good.
For electrical applications, there's obviously a big different between metallic/conducting tubes and semiconducting tubes. Since we currently don't have a robust way of separating out the various tube types, it's currently laborious to build devices that require a specific tube type. So in this sense our modern manufacturing methods are terrible: they generate mixtures of tube types and thus are not at all "pure" in that sense.
The state of the art is advancing rapidly. New production methods are able to generate desired tube type in much higher yield (80-90%); others are using DNA as a way to separate different types from mixtures; etc. We're on our way to having access to high-purity nanotube stocks. My guess is that if carbon nanotubes become viable for commercial-scale devices, then industry will rapidly figure out the last details about how to get nanotubes of a single type in large quantities.
I'm of two minds about whether RH is evil or prudent to do this
I'm no kernel hacker, but it's at least conceivable that RH's reasons for doing this are not to screw with Oracle or others, but rather because it's most convenient for them. Yes, having changes shipped separately is nice for a lot of people, but maybe RH decided to optimize their workflow, merging code and whatnot, and the end result of this optimization was that it was easier to distribute the merged code rather than distributing their internal toolchain, scripts, etc.
As others have pointed out, you can still compile their code, and diff against other branches of the kernel if you really want to see what the RH-specific changes are. So it's not like they are trying to end-run around the principles of Free Software. So, I think an 'evil' label would be premature.
- Patronage, where a wealthy person/group funds the creation of art. This was common before copyright. Although some of this funding will be purely altruistic ("just make great art for everyone"), this model also leads to self-indulgent or propaganda-like art.
- Donations, as is done with street performers, and non-profits both large and small (e.g. Wikipedia).
- Grants for the arts. Similar to donations, though the provenance of the funds may be different (e.g. in many countries governments set aside grants for artists).
- Merchandising, where the author creates the work as a way to sell trademarked paraphernalia (the "concert T-shirt" model, also used by many webcomics).
- Value added, where the author provides special things to paying customers, such as first access to the work, interviews with the author, etc. (e.g. Slashdot is free to read yet some people still subscribe).
- Sampler + Bounty. Author releases a 1st book (or first chapter of book), generates interest. They then start a funding campaign along the lines of "Volume 2 is almost finished and will be released for free to all when donations reach X dollars". Fans pay to support the artist they like.
I'm not necessarily saying that these are better than the current copyright system. I'm just saying that alternatives exist. Each mode has pros and cons. The downsides and upsides of copyright have been discussed at great length on Slashdot. But there are certainly alternatives, and if copyright were abolished, many artists would no doubt find other ways to make a living doing what they love. Of course many middle-men would be out of a job, and there's no guarantee that the same number of artists would be supported under an alternative system. Then again, it's possible that the alternative systems would actually support more artists and encourage more artwork. (See this previous comment, where I list a variety of creative things that are not protected from copyright and yet generate both a thriving industry and plenty of creative output.)
I had never noticed "there being a subtle (but satisfying) 'click' when plugging-in a cable".
I was referring to the story about how for the original iPod launch, Steve Jobs was aghast that the prototypes didn't have a satisfying 'click' when you plug-in the headphones. So he forced the engineers to spend all night putting in better jacks into the prototypes. (See here, or here, or here.)
Just like all companies Apple makes compromises.
Absolutely. They make mistakes and compromises, as I was careful to point out in my previous post. But the perceived quality of their products is more than just "convincing" people--they put much more careful thought into their designs and design tradeoffs. Are their products perfect? Far from it. But their designs are far better in consistency and execution, than all of their competition. (If you want to argue that 'being best' is too low a bar, and that products are in general not sufficiently carefully designed, I largely agree...)
I'm not saying that we should care about Apple product announcements, but Apple seems to be the only ones who can generate any significant buzz about whatever it is they're announcing.
The hype can get out of hand, but I think Apple more or less earns this exposure. The reason is Apple is one of the only companies that really puts effort into design.
Now, I say this despite not being much of a consumer of Apple products. My desktops (work and home) run Linux, though my laptop is a (4-year-old) Macbook Pro. But even though I have many reasons I don't like Apple products (lockin, etc.), I recognize the serious effort and skill they put into designing not just a product, but a successful user experience.
One of the reasons journalists and bloggers and design professionals and design enthusiasts all watch Apple closely is that they are one of the only companies that actually carries a design through to its full conclusion. Other manufacturers can, and do, come up with innovative ideas and the beginnings of a good design, but they all ultimately compromise on that design (usually for money). Think of something as simple as putting all those "Optimized for Windows" and "Intel inside" stickers on a laptop: I suspect those were not there in the original artist renderings; they are a corruption of the design. The crapware that is loaded is another corruption. Trying to get the price down to competitive levels requires all kinds of compromises in terms of build details, quality, etc. Edges don't meet quite flush because of some engineering or price constraint (not because it makes the device more pleasing to the user). UI elements are not very responsive because it would have taken too long to optimize that code. They don't worry about there being a subtle (but satisfying) 'click' when plugging-in a cable. And so on. (Note that I'm using "design" as shorthand for "design of the user experience"... obviously these companies have successfully engineered/designed products for a certain constraint-set.)
Apple makes its fair share of gaffes, and it's not obvious that all of their design choices are worth the premium costs. (Again, I mostly don't buy their stuff.) But as far as test cases to ponder, their products are the best around. One can really evaluate the pros and cons of a touch interface now that Apple put serious effort into designing a UI that is touch-centric (previously most touch interfaces were either crappy overlays on top of mousing UI (e.g. Windows tablets) or just terrible to begin win (e.g. a kiosk touch-UI)...).
So, in short, by having a focused vision and seeing it through to the end, they create products that are not ugly mixtures of compromises (where when things don't work you're left wondering if it's because it was a bad idea or poorly executed); their products are consistent and cohesive (so that you can evaluate a given design choice, and copy/improve/ignore it as needed in designing other products). Even if you don't like (and don't buy) their stuff, it's worth watching what they produce.
It's not like they win a prize or even get a cookie based on their internal metrics. There is no business advantage for them to have their internal metric of "good user experience" not correlate with actual user experience.
The metric they are using may be non-optimal or even plain wrong. But the idea that they are intentionally gaming their own internal metrics just so that they can claim "we pass our self-made tests of awesomeness!" is laughable. Google is not that stupid. They want valid metrics because they know that at the end of the day only by making users happy can they can they make money (through advertising, etc.).
I think one of the points Google is making is that objective and subjective measures are very different. People's perceptions very often are not an accurate measure of real trends. For instance there was a time when the quality of Google search results was decidedly better than competitors; everyone was aware of the quality and lauded them. Nowadays, we're totally accustomed to high-quality search results: from Google and its competitors. Thus we tend to be more critical, noticing flaws that we would have previously ignored (because we were so happy for any improvement over previously abysmal search tools). Thus, we feel that there is a local trend of "Google getting worse" when it really has more to do with our standards progressively getting higher. You can see similar trends at other levels of society: e.g. people often feel that crime is on the increase (even though, statistically, the long-term trend has been a decrease in crime in most developed countries), because recent and extreme news reports of crime are over-weighted compared to the numerous (and easily forgotten) days where nothing bad happened.
Of course, for Google to keep its users happy, their metric in some sense should account for people's shifting standards, emphasis on short term events, poor statistical intuition, and so on. In other words, to keep users happy, you have to take into account the foibles of the human mind. (E.g. status bars seem to be going faster if they include motion within them, and people will also report a status bar that starts slow and ends fast as "faster" than one which starts fast and ends slow, even if they take the same amount of time...) But just because you or I feel like the search results have gone downhill doesn't mean that they objectively have gotten worse.
The "NIST has also cut the number of labs it runs to 6 from 10" from the summary is very misleading. NIST just underwent a major re-organization, and reduced the number of administrative "labs" from 6 to 10. But none of the divisions within NIST were cut: various labs were just merged and divisions moved around to better reflect the modern research mission. No science programs were eliminated and no one was fired.
I commend your balanced viewpoint, and your ability to defer to credible evidence while keeping an open mind.
However I think you're being too harsh to the post you're replying to. You say:
The actual cause of such phenomena could very well be some not-yet-discovered natural force that has nothing to do with people at all, living or dead. What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them.
But the fact is that, quite simply, the case against ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, including a completely open-ended and nebulous 'unknown force of nature' is actually incredibly robust at this point in science. To explain this point in greater detail, I will defer to a better writer than me, and link to a blog post: Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.
The short version is that modern science has not only identified a set of forces and characterized them in detail, but in measuring all these things, we've also effectively mapped out the parameter space of possibilities in considerable detail. Thus we know the limits about what kinds of "previously unobserved" forces could possibly exist. And the territory that remains truly "unknown" is very "out there" (e.g. forces so weak that they would never affect our daily lives).
Of course any bit of science could be wrong. There could be forces/effects that operate in specific ways that cause them to be unusually strong in certain places and times but exceedingly weak all the rest of the time. More generally, all our theories and measurements could be wrong. But in the same way that at some point the evidence for a round Earth (or whatever) is so obvious and consistent and ubiquitous that it's no longer worth questioning, we are very much at the stage in science where it doesn't make sense to wonder if strange "unknown forces" are mysteriously changing temperatures and moving object's in someone's kitchen. We know the answer: no.
I have seen abundant evidence that the Earth is spherical. That's why I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory.
Indeed. And the reality is that the evidence against the paranormal is also very abundant.
The poster should go ahead and do the measurements. It's a good exercise in the scientific method. I guess it's possible he'll discover something revolutionary. But, again, it's possible, in some abstract sense, that we'll one day send a satellite into orbit and discover that the Earth is, in fact, not round and never was. But the possibility seems so remote that it's hardly worth actively trying to prove/disprove. Similarly in this case I really think the default stance should be to assume that any attempt to measure 'ghosts' will fail and just leave it at that. I know that sounds arrogant and presumptuous, but from the point of view of modern physics, the idea of trying to measure the paranormal (which has in fact been "measured" billions of times before, consistently producing null results) seems just as silly as trying to skeptically decide if the Earth is round or flat.
Exactly. This quote from the article seems deeply misguided:
Similarly, Hsu continues, "There's a perception among the older generations that grew up on keyboards that we would miss a keyboard. But as newer generations are raised on devices that have a gesture-based interface they just won't care," he says.
There are times when the "older generation" clings to outdated technology for nostalgic reasons, while the youngsters move on to the better tech (e.g. MP3 players replacing CDs). However that's not the case with keyboards, because physical keyboards have distinct advantages over virtual keyboards, and new generations of consumers are going to notice that! (Gesture interfaces are great for some things, but we're still going to want to write text in this brave new future, and to do that the keyboard is still king.)
As you pointed out, there will be devices for which a virtual keyboard makes more sense. And I have no doubt that manufacturers will keep improving those keyboards so that they close the gap with physical keyboards (using vibration-response and deformation of the screen to provide haptic cues are good ideas). But in any situation where you can afford to have a real keyboard (and I mean "afford" in the "have enough space" sense), people will prefer to have one.
What I do hope to see, however, is a convergence of the capabilities of both. This is what I see happening: virtual/touchscreen keyboards add features to be more 'physical-like' (vibration response to give some haptic cues, elastic displays that have a bit of 'give' so that you can feel the tap/click, deformable displays that reconfigure so that you can feel ridges for key edges, etc.) Meantime physical keyboards might start becoming more advanced (they are too expensive right now, but there are keyboards with built-in displays (the Optimus keyboard), and some that have variable-pressure sensors, etc.). We will likely reach a day where the current split between 'simple physical keyboard' and 'flat virtual keyboard on touchscreen' won't be the two options. Instead we'll have 'dynamically reconfigurable keyboards with deep key-press response' for desktops and laptops and 'dynamically reconfigurable keyboards with shallow key-press response' for tablets and smartphones.
Without intending to start a flame war, I wish the programming side of computing was as interested in making things smaller and faster in code.
I don't think it's as bad as all that. Believe me, I would love it if all the software I used were trimmed-down and brilliantly optimized. There is indeed quite a lot of software that is bloated and slow. But it really just comes down to value propositions: is it worth the effort (in programming time, testing, etc.)? For companies, it comes down to whether making the software faster will bring in more sales. For many products, it won't bring in new sales (as compared to adding some new feature), so they don't bother.
But in places where it does matter, there actually is some good competition. In browser rendering, for instance, the big players are all competing to improve performance (e.g. Mozilla). Think even of something as horribly inefficient as Adobe Acrobat Reader... It's inefficiency has in fact led to the creation of lighter-weight alternatives (e.g. Sumatra or FoxIt). Another example is in graphics: there are all kinds of brilliant and powerful algorithms and optimizations working in modern software to make the slick graphics we now take for granted.
In an ideal world, every piece of software would be crafted to perfection, and would ship as a perfectly secure, extremely small chunk of code that runs blazingly fast because of the thousands of meticulous assembly-level optimizations that were performed. Reality falls short. But, on the other hand, our modern computers are really quite functional and fast. So I would say we should keep putting pressure on vendors to ship faster software, to the extent that we notice the slowness and it bothers us... but we should also acknowledge the real effort that is going into optimization all the time.
Well the problem here is that the question "Does Moore's Law Hold True?" is not very precise. It's easy to show both that the law doesn't hold, and that it is being followed still today, depending on how tight your definitions are.
If you extrapolate from the date that Moore first made the prediction, using the transistor counts of the day and a particular scaling exponent ("doubling every two years"), then the extrapolated line, today, will not exactly match current transistor counts. So it fails.
But if you use the "Law" in its most general form, which is something like "computing power will increase exponentially with time" then yes, it's basically true. One of the problems with this, however, is that you can draw a straight-line, and get a power-law exponent, through a lot of datasets once plotted in a log-linear fashion. To know whether the data "really is" following a power law, you need to do some more careful statistics, and decide on what you think the error bars are. Again, with sufficiently large error bars, our computing power is certainly increasing exponentially. But, on the other hand, if you do a careful fit you'll find the scaling law is not constant: it actually changes in different time periods (corresponding to breakthroughs and corresponding maturation of technology, for instance). So claiming that the history of computing fits a single exponent is an approximation, at best.
So you really need to be clear what question you're asking. If the question is asking whether "Moore's Law" is really an incontrovertible law, then the answer is "no". If the question is whether it's been a pretty good predictor, then answer is "yes" (depending on what you mean by "pretty good" of course). If the question is "Does industry still use some kind of assumption of exponential scaling in their roadmapping?" the answer is "yes" (just go look at the roadmaps). If the question is "Can this exponential scaling continue forever?" then the answer is "no" (there are fundamental limits to computation). If the question is "When will the microelectronics industry stop being able to deliver new computers with exponentially more power?" then the answer is "I don't know."
Now, you could say, "Weakling. He should have managed his own impulses." And, I know he wanted to.
But, of course, deciding to activate the "weekly emailer" program, and deciding to NOT deactivate it, are precisely aspects of managing his own impulses. Good for him.
The point is that a person has multiple conflicting internal motivators. The balance of these motivators was tuned by evolution for a time period quite different from our current one (scarce resources, limited data, relatively short lifespan, etc.), which is why it produces perverse results in a modern world (e.g. over-eating). So it makes perfect sense to adjust the balance by giving more power/tools to the "good" motivators. So you create systems that emphasize the long-term goods (exercise, don't over-indulge in porn, etc.) over the short-term goods (getting what you want right now). Using technology to modify your own behavior is, in my opinion, not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of self-awareness: you have the intelligence and maturity to realize what forces are struggling to dictate your behavior, and you actively take steps to craft your environment in order to achieve your long-term goals. In an abstract sense, there's not much different between activating some self-limiting technology, and moving to someplace quiet so that you can concentrate. It's a matter of selecting your environment to help, rather than hinder, your goals. (Is someone who can't concentrate in a noisy place weak-willed? Or just human?)
In that sense, I'm all for technology providing people with options for adjusting their own behavior. I expect this to grow and I look forward to it. For instance, there is a body of research showing that people are better able to control their own bodies once you give them feedback (e.g. actively controlling your heartrate once you have a readout showing it). I try to eat healthily, but I'm always wondering if I'm getting too much, or not enough, of a given thing. If I had something that could monitor my diet and tell me "you could do with more potassium -- grab a banana instead of an apple for your snack today" that would be very useful. And having a gadget that counted "that's your third cookie today" would probably help me skip those times when I'm eating junk food for no good reason (e.g. I'm bored).
I absolutely agree that these technologies would be insidious if they were forced on anyone. It would undermine our self-determination. But if they simply exist, and people voluntarily decide to use them, to control their own lives. Well, that's actually a way to help people with their self-determination.
I agree with your position that both phones/platforms are good, and that it comes down to what people want.
However I don't think the main differentiator is "just works" vs. "customizable". In my experience, they both "just work" for the vast majority of things. Buy a new iPhone or a new Droid and you'll be answering emails and browsing the web within minutes. And both are extensible via apps: the app market for iPhone is somewhat bigger, but on Android you have the option to install non-approved apps. These balance out to some extent. Overall, both platforms are fantastic in terms of extending your phone's capabilities, because the "top" apps (the best thousand apps, say) are available on both platforms.
To me, the big difference is which ecosystem you're buying in to. If you use Google services (gmail, Google Calendar, Google Voice, etc.) then Android is simply amazing. Within a minute of getting your new phone, all your contact details, appointments, and so on are all working perfectly. (One of the times where "the cloud" actually works/makes sense.) If you buy heavily into iTunes and the rest of the Apple universe, then an iPhone will seamlessly integrate into your workflow.
Of course you don't have to buy into their technology the way they want you to (you can use gmail from an iPhone just fine), but the experience is more streamlined if you do. If you don't buy into either ecosystem, then both types of smartphone seem pretty evenly matched, at least in my experience.
I do agree, by the way, that Android is more customizable and hackable. For some people that's an important differentiator. But I think for the public-at-large the bigger differentiator has to do with what ecosystem they've already bought into (or want to start using)...
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?
Are you sure that it will be?
This is the key, I think.
There is a generally-held belief among coders that "doing it right, the first time" and "rewriting this mess" will save money in the long-term, and that managers are idiots for not seeing that. This can, of course, be true. But it isn't always true, and coders are sometimes projecting their OCD-desire to have nice code (and sometimes suffering from "I didn't write it so it must be crap" syndrome) and assuming that this will translate into the dollars and cents that the company cares about.
Sometimes it's worth it; sometimes it's really not.
The thing about money is that it is both non-linear (double the money doesn't necessarily have double the value; sometimes it has more than double because you can overcome barriers; sometimes it has less because of diminishing returns, etc.) and temporally varying (inflation, time-value-of-money, etc.). Because of this, it can actually make economic sense to do something in a half-baked way, and "pay the price" later on (in terms of higher support costs, or even having to totally re-do a task/project). For example, in cases where you "absolutely need it now" (the value of having it finished soon becomes larger than down-the-road problems) or because you can't spare the cash right now (the value of using that money to do something else right now is larger than the down-the-road problems). (If you want a physics analogy, notice that money is not a conservative force-field: it is a path-dependent process...)
I'm not saying that it always makes sense to do slipshod work now and suffer the consequences later. There are plenty of dumb managers who over-value short-term gains compared to long-term. But that doesn't mean that the optimal solution is to spend massive effort up-front; there is such a thing as being too much of a perfectionist. And, importantly, the right answer will vary wildly depending on circumstances and the current state of the business. A startup may need a product to show (anything!) in order to secure more money. Doing it "right" will mean bankruptcy, which is far worse than having to keep fixing and maintaining a piece of shoddy code for years to come. A very well-established company, on the other hand, may do serious damage to their reputation if they release something buggy; and can probably afford to delay a release.
Actually figuring out the cost/benefit is not simple. In principle this is what good managers and good accountants are there to do: to figure out how best to allocate the finite resources. If you think you've found a way to reduce costs by implementing testing, then by all means show them the data that supports your case. However don't assume that just because testing will make the product better, that it actually makes sense from a business perspective.
1. Verizon iPhone
2. BlackBerry PlayBook
3. Honeycomb Tablets
4. Even More Tablets
5. Chrome OS Notebooks
6. Phones with Dual-Core Processors
7. Mac App Store
8. Google TV: Take 2
9. Hulu for Magazines
10. Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Fusion Processors
11. Sony PlayStation Phone
12. Net Neutrality Rules in Practice
The base technology (processors, etc.) is under-represented compared to hot product categories (tablets and smartphones). Clearly they were more focused on "products" (and "business models") and not so focused on new "technologies".
Slashdot Mirror
I've wondered similar things. In the form of a question, I might put it:
What is the long-term plan to integrate Bitcoin with traditional banking and financial systems?
I understand that a core principle of Bitcoin is to provide an (anonymous) alternative to such systems, but something like a Bitcoin currency exchange clearly qualifies as a financial institution within a particular jurisdiction. If Bitcoin starts becoming successful (widely used), you won't be able to avoid scrutiny and regulation. This isn't a bad thing, either: many financial regulations are a good thing, protecting individual depositors/investors/traders from fraud or malfeasance (e.g. insider trading or an exchange operator giving themselves a trading advantage). Even while Bitcoins remain anonymous currency (like cash), institutions that store/exchange Bitcoins will probably need to be regulated. I, personally, have wanted to join the Bitcoin economy but was turned off by the amateurish and non-reputable state of current exchanges. There are no guarantees, no safeguards, no oversight, no insurance, and no straightforward way for me to establish the credibility of any of these exchanges. Are there plans to change this?
Well I know it's cheating to RTFA, but most of the complaints in the comments right now are totally missing the mark, since their worries are addressed in the actual blog post. There's plenty enough that's wrong with this idea without imagining problems that are not there or haven't been addressed in this idea. (And it is just an off-the-wall idea right now.)
Let me address some complaints: 1. Why hide the URL bar, it gives useful information! The proposal actually still keeps all the URL information. However instead of it always sitting at the top of the browser chrome, it's attached to the webpage, and scrolls up/down with it so that you can scroll it out of the way when you want. There is some logic to this: you normally want to look at the URL when you first land on a page. After that you don't need it as much. (Yes, there are exceptions.) The proposal is in fact to add more information to keep the user informed. (A possible downside is information overload.)
2. Why is Mozilla copying Google? From what I can tell this isn't inspired from Google, other than in the sense that there is a general trend to reduce chrome (and not just in browsers). The Google proposal is to auto-hide the URL bar, and have it popup when needed. This proposal is to conceptually attach the url to the page rather than to the browser chrome.
3. How am I going to enter new URLs without the URL bar? The proposal is that you will either edit the URL that is at the top of the current page, or use a "browse" command where you'll be able to type or paste an URL.
Now, having addressed (partially) those immediate concerns, let's ask whether this is a good idea or not. Personally, I'm in favor of at least designing and testing new, crazy UI ideas. It's the only way that we can discover new and better ways to interact with out computer. So I'm supportive of having a discussion, and I don't think changing the URL bar should be off the table. That having been said, the proposal has a number of problems:
1. It heavily draws upon Jef Raskin's design rule of "there should be only one way to accomplish a certain atomic task". The idea is that by having only way, good, way to do something, users can train and habitualize and accomplish the task faster and without thinking. It's true that psych research has shown that having options (including different ways to do the same thing) subtly slows down a person's response time and thus can jar their thought processes. However I haven't seen any conclusive research showing that this is significant enough to warrant having a "only one way" rule--since it denies (for instance) power users the ability to learn keyboard shortcuts, can make it more difficult for accessibility or even just for people of various abilities (some people can't type well but can click on icons well enough). The design in the blog post favors a natural-language text entry system (basically the Ubiquity system that exists for Firefox). Personally, I quite like that mode of controlling a computer, but I suspect the vast majority of people would view this kind of command-entry (much like a commandline, though somewhat more forgiving) as being very intimidating. Overall, I'm not convinced that having only "one way" to control the interface makes sense.
2. The author takes it as a given that we should aim to reduce application chrome. Again, I personally agree with this from both an aesthetic standpoint, and from a usability standpoint. But then again, that's because I'm happy spending the time to memorize keyboard shortcuts and other tricks (e.g. instaling mouse gestures) so that I can remove the chrome and concentrate on the content. But, again, I don't think this really applies to everyone.
I use multi-monitor setups (2 monitors at work; 4 at home), but still prefer single-window mode. Nothing stops the user from stretching the single window across the multiple monitors, after all.
The thing that frustrates me about GIMP's floating palettes is that if I have other windows open, then in order to bring GIMP fully to the front, I need to click through all of the various sub-windows. I've learned to work around it (e.g. in KDE I can middle-click other windows to push them fully behind the GIMP; generally I try to put GIMP on its own desktop)... but sometimes I'll forget my tricks and end up with the GIMP's windows annoyingly mixed in with other things I'm working on. It would be much simpler to have all the GIMP windows behave as a single entity.
In general I dislike floating palettes because they can obscure the thing you're working on. Docking them just seems cleaner if you've got the screen real estate.
Of course it's a matter of preference and work style. Whatever makes a particular user more productive is right for them. So hopefully it will remain an option in GIMP. I think Inkscape's model is pretty good, incidentally. It starts as a single-window, and all the palettes open up as docked palettes. However there's are keyboard shortcuts for quickly going into fullscreen mode, and for quickly toggling palettes visible/hide. So you can get a huge canvas and still have quick-access to tools. In Inkscape, the palettes can also be torn off from the main window and floated wherever you want (inside or outside of main window), with it remembering the location you selected. This, I think, gives you the best of both worlds: the default is structured and contained, but you can easily customize it as needed (dragging often-used palettes to a second monitor, etc.). It works quite well.
To recap the reason why current 3D implementations are lacking (and thus give some people a headache)... Humans use at least 5 tricks to determine the three-dimensional makeup of a scene:
1. Focal depth: based on how much the eye's lens has to focus
2. Convergence: based on the slight differences in pointing of the two eyes to a target
3. Stereopsis (static parallax): based on the slight differences between the left and right eye images
4. Motion parallax: based on the different displacements/motions of objects at different distances (e.g. as you move your head)
5. Visual inference: reconstructing using cues like occlusion, lighting, etc.
In the real world, all 5 of those systems work in concert, giving you a consistent understanding of your environment. The problem with modern 3D implementations is that they only trick you using only two, or maybe three, of the above. For instance "3D glasses" are showing you different left/right images, creating fake stereopsis, but the focal distance is still "to the screen" and doesn't match the apparent parallax-based distance to objects. So your brain is rightly confused because the various systems are giving conflicting answers. Amazingly our brains have no problem looking at two-dimensional images like pictures and conventional movies: in such cases 1-4 don't work, and our brains instead just use #5 to fully reconstruct/guess at the three-dimensional nature of the scene. A few optical illusions notwithstanding, this works remarkably well.
What's presented in the above video is fooling your brain using motion parallax. This is neat, but because the image is still flat, your other brain systems (1-3) will be giving a different answer and so the illusion won't be perfect.
In principle we could combine techniques to make for a more convincing sort of 3D. E.g. combine motion parallax (eye tracking) with stereopsis (3D glasses). But it won't be truly convincing (and thus headache-free) until we fully reconstruct the three-dimensional light-field that should properly be emanating from the virtual objects. Doing this requires some very good holography, to fully reconstruct the required light waveforms, or something like anisotropic pixels that can control their emission as a function of viewing angle. In the meantime, 3D will remain a bit of a gimmick outside of some niche applications.
Hm. When thought about this way, the "escalating version numbers" bother me much less.
When you think about it, I have tons of software on my machine that goes through version numbers without me noticing. I do my "apt-get upgrade" and all my software is just a little bit better. If Firefox really goes to this "milestone model" then it will be like that also. Rather than me getting excited about a new release, it will just appear in my normal updates and I won't pay it much heed.
From a user perspective this is probably better. Fixes and features get to me sooner and more reliably. My browser changes more incrementally rather than in big jumps. (This is a debatable advantage, since many users hate it when their software slowly changes as they update.) I don't have to think as much about Firefox releases.
This may, however, be a net loss from a hype/advertising point of view. Rather than getting all kinds of jazzy articles about the "next awesome version of Firefox", please will be less excited and it will just become "oh, yeah, there were some bugfixes in the last milestone... whatever..." Time will tell, I suppose.
There is another huge difference. The argument outlined in the summary is only thinking at the level of individual people, especially lay-people (who are most disconnected from the endeavors). What happens if you think at the level of society as a whole? Well, then the difference between evidence-based belief and faith-based belief become more obvious.
... not building jets), and logical participants can thus decide between which worldview is a better match to reality, even though they don't fully understand all the cogs and gears in all the competing worldviews. So the participants don't need to rely on faith, they can use logic and inference to decide what is true.
Think first about how even an "expert scientist" knows certain things are true. They've studied their field, done a bunch of experiments, and so they've witnessed first-hand certain persuasive empirical facts. Yet, the scientific knowledge they have goes way beyond their personal research. They have in their minds a bunch of results and proofs from other scientists, that they accept as valid. (They are also aware of findings that they don't agree with.) They draw upon knowledge in other domains of science that they know little about: they trust the experts in those other fields. Calling all of this "faith" isn't quite right. It's more like "outsourcing" certain parts of your knowledge-discovery to others: delegating information-tasks to people you trust and then amalgamating the results into your worldview. Of course your final view of reality is only as good as all those inputs (plus your own experiments and reasoning)...
Now jump up to the macro/societal level. Although no individual scientist fully understands all of science, society as a whole understands a heck of a lot. And society as a whole is able to apply that knowledge to making useful, testable predictions and to making useful, tangible products (cars, jets, computers, etc.). This is a variant of the old "no single person knows how to make a pencil" thing. Although no individual scientist, or lay person, can fully understand all of the knowledge that we've accumulated, they can easily see outputs of that knowledge, and they can test sub-sets of that knowledge as much as they want, and so they can develop confidence in the overall knowledge-base and associated worldview. In a loose sense, you could say that although no individual understands science, the human race does.
By comparison, a faith-based description remains faith-based and without evidence even at the largest level. If you amalgamate all of society's evidence for a particular faith-claim (say, the existence of an unseen force/spirit/god), it's actually no different than a single-person's evidence. That is to say, even at a high level the argument remains faith: "you just need to believe this is true". So at the level of the human race, there is no understanding/knowledge, just faith.
The difference in how knowledge scales between the two cases is what gives rise to the operational differences (e.g. building jets versus
Indeed. There are a lot of problems with just having the pointer just follow a person's eyes. Obviously there are applications in terms of accessibility (which appears to be the target market), but for the general user this would be painfully frustrating to use: people very frequently look at one part of the screen while typing/manipulating in some other window. There's also no way that using your eyes would be as easy and accurate as using a mouse (your eyes intentionally jitter about).
I'm disappointed that we haven't seen anything beyond a simple "directly control mouse pointer" implementation. There are so many more interesting things one could imagine. For instance a "focus follows eyes" like "focus follows mouse" would be interesting. (Not for a general user, mind you, but as an option for people who have a certain kind of workflow.) Something else I would love to see is a "smart snap-to". For instance if I'm looking at a given widget, and I move the mouse pointer from far away towards the widget I'm staring at, it could immediately "snap" onto that widget, so that I can easily click/interact with it. It would only work if calibrated correctly so that it isn't triggered during normal operations (e.g. I'm moving an object in a program, my eye focus is fairly close to the pointer, so it shouldn't snap annoyingly) and only exists as an 'accelerator' during big pointer movements. It could actually be implemented as a sort of region around my focus that has 'slower mouse acceleration' so that the pointer sorta gets trapped in that area (effectively creating a Fitt's Law "big target" where I'm looking), probably coupled with some context-awareness (e.g. only active when I'm looking at UI chrome, not movable elements within a program or the canvas of a drawing app...)
The devil is in the details, but I think there's a way to implement it where it would be helpful in many cases (the pointer magically moving where you wanted it to) without screwing up other cases (when you want to delicately move the mouse). I'm sure there are lots of other neat ways that eye-tracking and mouse movements could be ingeniously combined (when my eyes are searching around frantically, make the mouse pointer glow so that I can find it?)... a simple control of the mouse pointer doesn't sound great.
(One problem with the things I'm proposing is that they are so subtle and such small gains in productivity that they certainly wouldn't justify a cost much beyond what a webcam costs...)
Yes, Google can comfortably decry software patents because their business model is not dependent on them. But that's the point, isn't it?
Google's point of view deserves to be heard because it informs the debate. They are an example of a big software company innovating and making money without relying on software patents. This weakens the argument for software patents being absolutely necessary for economic progress in this sector. Moreover Google can make a compelling case for how they could innovate/produce more if software patents were not standing in their way.
Of course just because Google has a business model that doesn't rely on software patents doesn't mean that all software companies will be in the same position. (Certainly not all software companies can become advertising companies!) But that's fine, too: we hear the opinions of those companies who "rely" on software patents to remain viable. But Google's opinion is not invalidated just because they don't need patents; that is the very crux of why their opinion is relevant!
Besides, let us not forget that the primary question in this debate shouldn't be "what makes companies the most money?" We should be asking about what kind of wealth we want to generate in our society (money? innovation? health? happiness?), and then optimizing laws to achieve said goals. No matter what laws we enact, there will be some losers and some winners. The idea is to find the balance where the overall social gains are maximized. If we got rid of software patents, there would be losers (e.g. Microsoft), but possibly more winners (Google, all the small-time businesses, open source, etc.). Even within a "loser" things might not be so bad: some parts of Microsoft's business would suffer, but others might flourish (e.g. there is certainly a cost for Microsoft to have to defend itself against other's patents).
Indeed. Humans infer distances and thus reconstruct three-dimensional scenes from their two-dimensional retinas using at least five levels of measurement/processing:
1. Focal depth: based on how much the eye has to focus
2. Convergence: based on the slight differences in pointing of the two eyes
3. Stereoscopy: based on the slight differences between the left and right image
4. Parallax: the different displacements/motions of objects at different distances
5. Visual inference: reconstructing using cues like occlusion, lighting, etc.
When you watch a normal 2D movie, 1, 2, 3, and 4 don't work. So your brain relies entirely on #5. This turns out to work remarkably well, because our brains are quite good at inferring and guessing what the real 3D scene looks like. (For instance, whenever looking at faraway objects, this is pretty much all you have to work with.) Move-makers have also learned how to best frame shots to make things look 'right'. And at least 1, 2, and 3 agree with each other, so your eyes can simply focus on the theater's screen (it also helps that the screen is far away).
The various versions of "3D" try to trick you, but unfortunately they don't hit all 5 of the above and so this confuses your brain. A typical 'glasses' setup tricks you using #3, but now the position of objects as determined by #3 doesn't match 1 or 2, so your brain gets confused (tiredness and headaches ensue). And try as it might, it can't compensate (e.g. no matter how hard it tries, it can't bring out-of-focus things into focus). Really bad 3D (where things 'jump out' at you and whatnot) can even violate #5. Ultimately your brain isn't happy because half the signals are saying one thing (distance to the theater screen) and the other half are saying something else (object really close to you!).
Nintendo's 3DS apparently tries to use parallax to fool your brain, but again the effect won't be perfect, so your brain will be unhappy.
To be truly 3D, you would need to record, and then reproduce/project, the entire waveform (e.g. collect light from every angle impinging on your camera 'screen'). In principle holography can do this, but in practice we don't have good technology. Besides, this causes many other problems (e.g. every person in a theater sees a slightly different angle, that's not necessarily desirable). True 3D isn't going to be technologically feasible anytime soon. In the meantime, we will have only approximate 3D solutions... which it seems are actually worse than just allowing the person's brain to fill in the blanks.
His take on advertising also jumps to conclusions:
This is a fallacy I've tried to point out before. If advertisers know everything about you, that doesn't mean they will only show you ads for things you care about, or ads you find pleasant/funny/good. The point of advertising/marketing is to shift your purchasing behavior, and being pleasant will not always be the best way to achieve this. Ads that are repetitive, annoying, boring, or otherwise unpleasant may be "effective" from a marketing standpoint. E.g. people hate seeing the same commercial over and over again (sometimes more than once in a single commercial break!) but it's no accident: they know that they can increase brand recognition by searing their jingle/logo/etc. into your brain.
And advertisers have huge incentives to show you ads for things you "don't care about". In fact advertising things you really care about is mostly a waste: you're too well-informed and opinionated to sway. To bring up the stereotypical example: males may not care about tampons, but advertisers still want them to see tampon ads, because sooner or later that guy is going to have to buy tampons (e.g. his wife asks him to pick some up on the way home) and the company wants the guy's default, uninformed choice to be driven not by careful research but by advertising and brand loyalty.
Basically, the goals of the advertisers and the goals of the consumer are not aligned in any way.
The same is true of many of the other examples presented in the hypothetical. It's somewhat assumed that people will use the pervasive information in fairly logical and reasonable ways. But that's not how companies or people operate. Companies are effectively predatory. People are often illogical. For instance giving people more information doesn't always lead to better decisions. Studies have shown that people get overloaded and make sub-optimal decisions beyond a certain level.
Basically, the gains that are described as a result of "no privacy" would only occur if all the participants were very good, honest, smart, and balanced. But if you're using "very good, honest, smart, balanced people" as a starting axiom, then the "no privacy" thing isn't really necessary, since a good society will evolve in any case. The problem is that in reality people are variable, illogical, and somewhat selfish. We need to design societies that take into account human behavior, not societies that idealize it.
as I understand it, there's no good way of making high-quality naontubes in large batches. Is that still accurate?
It's a bit more complicated than that. Actually we now have a variety of very good procedures for making high-quality nanotubes in reasonably large quantities. You can buy carbon nanotubes quite easily now. The nanotubes are long, defect-free, and have low concentrations of impurities (e.g. catalyst). And one can make the nanotubes purely single-walled, or purely double-walled, or multi-walled. We have a high level of control. In these senses, you can certainly say that "high quality" tubes are a reality.
The problem is the purity of tube type. Carbon nanotubes of a given diameter come in a variety of types ("chirality"), depending on how orientation of the graphene network with relation to the tube axis. The various types have different properties: some are 'metallic', some are semiconducting. For some applications you don't care about tube type. For instance if you're loading nanotubes into a material as a strengthening agent, then all nanotubes are equally good.
For electrical applications, there's obviously a big different between metallic/conducting tubes and semiconducting tubes. Since we currently don't have a robust way of separating out the various tube types, it's currently laborious to build devices that require a specific tube type. So in this sense our modern manufacturing methods are terrible: they generate mixtures of tube types and thus are not at all "pure" in that sense.
The state of the art is advancing rapidly. New production methods are able to generate desired tube type in much higher yield (80-90%); others are using DNA as a way to separate different types from mixtures; etc. We're on our way to having access to high-purity nanotube stocks. My guess is that if carbon nanotubes become viable for commercial-scale devices, then industry will rapidly figure out the last details about how to get nanotubes of a single type in large quantities.
I'm of two minds about whether RH is evil or prudent to do this
I'm no kernel hacker, but it's at least conceivable that RH's reasons for doing this are not to screw with Oracle or others, but rather because it's most convenient for them. Yes, having changes shipped separately is nice for a lot of people, but maybe RH decided to optimize their workflow, merging code and whatnot, and the end result of this optimization was that it was easier to distribute the merged code rather than distributing their internal toolchain, scripts, etc.
As others have pointed out, you can still compile their code, and diff against other branches of the kernel if you really want to see what the RH-specific changes are. So it's not like they are trying to end-run around the principles of Free Software. So, I think an 'evil' label would be premature.
Alternative models include:
- Patronage, where a wealthy person/group funds the creation of art. This was common before copyright. Although some of this funding will be purely altruistic ("just make great art for everyone"), this model also leads to self-indulgent or propaganda-like art.
- Donations, as is done with street performers, and non-profits both large and small (e.g. Wikipedia).
- Grants for the arts. Similar to donations, though the provenance of the funds may be different (e.g. in many countries governments set aside grants for artists).
- Merchandising, where the author creates the work as a way to sell trademarked paraphernalia (the "concert T-shirt" model, also used by many webcomics).
- Value added, where the author provides special things to paying customers, such as first access to the work, interviews with the author, etc. (e.g. Slashdot is free to read yet some people still subscribe).
- Sampler + Bounty. Author releases a 1st book (or first chapter of book), generates interest. They then start a funding campaign along the lines of "Volume 2 is almost finished and will be released for free to all when donations reach X dollars". Fans pay to support the artist they like.
I'm not necessarily saying that these are better than the current copyright system. I'm just saying that alternatives exist. Each mode has pros and cons. The downsides and upsides of copyright have been discussed at great length on Slashdot. But there are certainly alternatives, and if copyright were abolished, many artists would no doubt find other ways to make a living doing what they love. Of course many middle-men would be out of a job, and there's no guarantee that the same number of artists would be supported under an alternative system. Then again, it's possible that the alternative systems would actually support more artists and encourage more artwork. (See this previous comment, where I list a variety of creative things that are not protected from copyright and yet generate both a thriving industry and plenty of creative output.)
I had never noticed "there being a subtle (but satisfying) 'click' when plugging-in a cable".
I was referring to the story about how for the original iPod launch, Steve Jobs was aghast that the prototypes didn't have a satisfying 'click' when you plug-in the headphones. So he forced the engineers to spend all night putting in better jacks into the prototypes. (See here, or here, or here.)
Just like all companies Apple makes compromises.
Absolutely. They make mistakes and compromises, as I was careful to point out in my previous post. But the perceived quality of their products is more than just "convincing" people--they put much more careful thought into their designs and design tradeoffs. Are their products perfect? Far from it. But their designs are far better in consistency and execution, than all of their competition. (If you want to argue that 'being best' is too low a bar, and that products are in general not sufficiently carefully designed, I largely agree...)
I'm not saying that we should care about Apple product announcements, but Apple seems to be the only ones who can generate any significant buzz about whatever it is they're announcing.
The hype can get out of hand, but I think Apple more or less earns this exposure. The reason is Apple is one of the only companies that really puts effort into design.
Now, I say this despite not being much of a consumer of Apple products. My desktops (work and home) run Linux, though my laptop is a (4-year-old) Macbook Pro. But even though I have many reasons I don't like Apple products (lockin, etc.), I recognize the serious effort and skill they put into designing not just a product, but a successful user experience.
One of the reasons journalists and bloggers and design professionals and design enthusiasts all watch Apple closely is that they are one of the only companies that actually carries a design through to its full conclusion. Other manufacturers can, and do, come up with innovative ideas and the beginnings of a good design, but they all ultimately compromise on that design (usually for money). Think of something as simple as putting all those "Optimized for Windows" and "Intel inside" stickers on a laptop: I suspect those were not there in the original artist renderings; they are a corruption of the design. The crapware that is loaded is another corruption. Trying to get the price down to competitive levels requires all kinds of compromises in terms of build details, quality, etc. Edges don't meet quite flush because of some engineering or price constraint (not because it makes the device more pleasing to the user). UI elements are not very responsive because it would have taken too long to optimize that code. They don't worry about there being a subtle (but satisfying) 'click' when plugging-in a cable. And so on. (Note that I'm using "design" as shorthand for "design of the user experience"... obviously these companies have successfully engineered/designed products for a certain constraint-set.)
Apple makes its fair share of gaffes, and it's not obvious that all of their design choices are worth the premium costs. (Again, I mostly don't buy their stuff.) But as far as test cases to ponder, their products are the best around. One can really evaluate the pros and cons of a touch interface now that Apple put serious effort into designing a UI that is touch-centric (previously most touch interfaces were either crappy overlays on top of mousing UI (e.g. Windows tablets) or just terrible to begin win (e.g. a kiosk touch-UI)...).
So, in short, by having a focused vision and seeing it through to the end, they create products that are not ugly mixtures of compromises (where when things don't work you're left wondering if it's because it was a bad idea or poorly executed); their products are consistent and cohesive (so that you can evaluate a given design choice, and copy/improve/ignore it as needed in designing other products). Even if you don't like (and don't buy) their stuff, it's worth watching what they produce.
It's not like they win a prize or even get a cookie based on their internal metrics. There is no business advantage for them to have their internal metric of "good user experience" not correlate with actual user experience.
The metric they are using may be non-optimal or even plain wrong. But the idea that they are intentionally gaming their own internal metrics just so that they can claim "we pass our self-made tests of awesomeness!" is laughable. Google is not that stupid. They want valid metrics because they know that at the end of the day only by making users happy can they can they make money (through advertising, etc.).
I think one of the points Google is making is that objective and subjective measures are very different. People's perceptions very often are not an accurate measure of real trends. For instance there was a time when the quality of Google search results was decidedly better than competitors; everyone was aware of the quality and lauded them. Nowadays, we're totally accustomed to high-quality search results: from Google and its competitors. Thus we tend to be more critical, noticing flaws that we would have previously ignored (because we were so happy for any improvement over previously abysmal search tools). Thus, we feel that there is a local trend of "Google getting worse" when it really has more to do with our standards progressively getting higher. You can see similar trends at other levels of society: e.g. people often feel that crime is on the increase (even though, statistically, the long-term trend has been a decrease in crime in most developed countries), because recent and extreme news reports of crime are over-weighted compared to the numerous (and easily forgotten) days where nothing bad happened.
Of course, for Google to keep its users happy, their metric in some sense should account for people's shifting standards, emphasis on short term events, poor statistical intuition, and so on. In other words, to keep users happy, you have to take into account the foibles of the human mind. (E.g. status bars seem to be going faster if they include motion within them, and people will also report a status bar that starts slow and ends fast as "faster" than one which starts fast and ends slow, even if they take the same amount of time...) But just because you or I feel like the search results have gone downhill doesn't mean that they objectively have gotten worse.
Not everything's lost - only 4 labs!
The "NIST has also cut the number of labs it runs to 6 from 10" from the summary is very misleading. NIST just underwent a major re-organization, and reduced the number of administrative "labs" from 6 to 10. But none of the divisions within NIST were cut: various labs were just merged and divisions moved around to better reflect the modern research mission. No science programs were eliminated and no one was fired.
(I used to work at NIST.)
However I think you're being too harsh to the post you're replying to. You say:
The actual cause of such phenomena could very well be some not-yet-discovered natural force that has nothing to do with people at all, living or dead. What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them.
But the fact is that, quite simply, the case against ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, including a completely open-ended and nebulous 'unknown force of nature' is actually incredibly robust at this point in science. To explain this point in greater detail, I will defer to a better writer than me, and link to a blog post: Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.
The short version is that modern science has not only identified a set of forces and characterized them in detail, but in measuring all these things, we've also effectively mapped out the parameter space of possibilities in considerable detail. Thus we know the limits about what kinds of "previously unobserved" forces could possibly exist. And the territory that remains truly "unknown" is very "out there" (e.g. forces so weak that they would never affect our daily lives).
Of course any bit of science could be wrong. There could be forces/effects that operate in specific ways that cause them to be unusually strong in certain places and times but exceedingly weak all the rest of the time. More generally, all our theories and measurements could be wrong. But in the same way that at some point the evidence for a round Earth (or whatever) is so obvious and consistent and ubiquitous that it's no longer worth questioning, we are very much at the stage in science where it doesn't make sense to wonder if strange "unknown forces" are mysteriously changing temperatures and moving object's in someone's kitchen. We know the answer: no.
I have seen abundant evidence that the Earth is spherical. That's why I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory.
Indeed. And the reality is that the evidence against the paranormal is also very abundant.
The poster should go ahead and do the measurements. It's a good exercise in the scientific method. I guess it's possible he'll discover something revolutionary. But, again, it's possible, in some abstract sense, that we'll one day send a satellite into orbit and discover that the Earth is, in fact, not round and never was. But the possibility seems so remote that it's hardly worth actively trying to prove/disprove. Similarly in this case I really think the default stance should be to assume that any attempt to measure 'ghosts' will fail and just leave it at that. I know that sounds arrogant and presumptuous, but from the point of view of modern physics, the idea of trying to measure the paranormal (which has in fact been "measured" billions of times before, consistently producing null results) seems just as silly as trying to skeptically decide if the Earth is round or flat.
There are times when the "older generation" clings to outdated technology for nostalgic reasons, while the youngsters move on to the better tech (e.g. MP3 players replacing CDs). However that's not the case with keyboards, because physical keyboards have distinct advantages over virtual keyboards, and new generations of consumers are going to notice that! (Gesture interfaces are great for some things, but we're still going to want to write text in this brave new future, and to do that the keyboard is still king.)
As you pointed out, there will be devices for which a virtual keyboard makes more sense. And I have no doubt that manufacturers will keep improving those keyboards so that they close the gap with physical keyboards (using vibration-response and deformation of the screen to provide haptic cues are good ideas). But in any situation where you can afford to have a real keyboard (and I mean "afford" in the "have enough space" sense), people will prefer to have one.
What I do hope to see, however, is a convergence of the capabilities of both. This is what I see happening: virtual/touchscreen keyboards add features to be more 'physical-like' (vibration response to give some haptic cues, elastic displays that have a bit of 'give' so that you can feel the tap/click, deformable displays that reconfigure so that you can feel ridges for key edges, etc.) Meantime physical keyboards might start becoming more advanced (they are too expensive right now, but there are keyboards with built-in displays (the Optimus keyboard), and some that have variable-pressure sensors, etc.). We will likely reach a day where the current split between 'simple physical keyboard' and 'flat virtual keyboard on touchscreen' won't be the two options. Instead we'll have 'dynamically reconfigurable keyboards with deep key-press response' for desktops and laptops and 'dynamically reconfigurable keyboards with shallow key-press response' for tablets and smartphones.
Without intending to start a flame war, I wish the programming side of computing was as interested in making things smaller and faster in code.
I don't think it's as bad as all that. Believe me, I would love it if all the software I used were trimmed-down and brilliantly optimized. There is indeed quite a lot of software that is bloated and slow. But it really just comes down to value propositions: is it worth the effort (in programming time, testing, etc.)? For companies, it comes down to whether making the software faster will bring in more sales. For many products, it won't bring in new sales (as compared to adding some new feature), so they don't bother.
But in places where it does matter, there actually is some good competition. In browser rendering, for instance, the big players are all competing to improve performance (e.g. Mozilla). Think even of something as horribly inefficient as Adobe Acrobat Reader... It's inefficiency has in fact led to the creation of lighter-weight alternatives (e.g. Sumatra or FoxIt). Another example is in graphics: there are all kinds of brilliant and powerful algorithms and optimizations working in modern software to make the slick graphics we now take for granted.
In an ideal world, every piece of software would be crafted to perfection, and would ship as a perfectly secure, extremely small chunk of code that runs blazingly fast because of the thousands of meticulous assembly-level optimizations that were performed. Reality falls short. But, on the other hand, our modern computers are really quite functional and fast. So I would say we should keep putting pressure on vendors to ship faster software, to the extent that we notice the slowness and it bothers us... but we should also acknowledge the real effort that is going into optimization all the time.
Well the problem here is that the question "Does Moore's Law Hold True?" is not very precise. It's easy to show both that the law doesn't hold, and that it is being followed still today, depending on how tight your definitions are.
If you extrapolate from the date that Moore first made the prediction, using the transistor counts of the day and a particular scaling exponent ("doubling every two years"), then the extrapolated line, today, will not exactly match current transistor counts. So it fails.
But if you use the "Law" in its most general form, which is something like "computing power will increase exponentially with time" then yes, it's basically true. One of the problems with this, however, is that you can draw a straight-line, and get a power-law exponent, through a lot of datasets once plotted in a log-linear fashion. To know whether the data "really is" following a power law, you need to do some more careful statistics, and decide on what you think the error bars are. Again, with sufficiently large error bars, our computing power is certainly increasing exponentially. But, on the other hand, if you do a careful fit you'll find the scaling law is not constant: it actually changes in different time periods (corresponding to breakthroughs and corresponding maturation of technology, for instance). So claiming that the history of computing fits a single exponent is an approximation, at best.
So you really need to be clear what question you're asking. If the question is asking whether "Moore's Law" is really an incontrovertible law, then the answer is "no". If the question is whether it's been a pretty good predictor, then answer is "yes" (depending on what you mean by "pretty good" of course). If the question is "Does industry still use some kind of assumption of exponential scaling in their roadmapping?" the answer is "yes" (just go look at the roadmaps). If the question is "Can this exponential scaling continue forever?" then the answer is "no" (there are fundamental limits to computation). If the question is "When will the microelectronics industry stop being able to deliver new computers with exponentially more power?" then the answer is "I don't know."
Now, you could say, "Weakling. He should have managed his own impulses." And, I know he wanted to.
But, of course, deciding to activate the "weekly emailer" program, and deciding to NOT deactivate it, are precisely aspects of managing his own impulses. Good for him.
The point is that a person has multiple conflicting internal motivators. The balance of these motivators was tuned by evolution for a time period quite different from our current one (scarce resources, limited data, relatively short lifespan, etc.), which is why it produces perverse results in a modern world (e.g. over-eating). So it makes perfect sense to adjust the balance by giving more power/tools to the "good" motivators. So you create systems that emphasize the long-term goods (exercise, don't over-indulge in porn, etc.) over the short-term goods (getting what you want right now). Using technology to modify your own behavior is, in my opinion, not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of self-awareness: you have the intelligence and maturity to realize what forces are struggling to dictate your behavior, and you actively take steps to craft your environment in order to achieve your long-term goals. In an abstract sense, there's not much different between activating some self-limiting technology, and moving to someplace quiet so that you can concentrate. It's a matter of selecting your environment to help, rather than hinder, your goals. (Is someone who can't concentrate in a noisy place weak-willed? Or just human?)
In that sense, I'm all for technology providing people with options for adjusting their own behavior. I expect this to grow and I look forward to it. For instance, there is a body of research showing that people are better able to control their own bodies once you give them feedback (e.g. actively controlling your heartrate once you have a readout showing it). I try to eat healthily, but I'm always wondering if I'm getting too much, or not enough, of a given thing. If I had something that could monitor my diet and tell me "you could do with more potassium -- grab a banana instead of an apple for your snack today" that would be very useful. And having a gadget that counted "that's your third cookie today" would probably help me skip those times when I'm eating junk food for no good reason (e.g. I'm bored).
I absolutely agree that these technologies would be insidious if they were forced on anyone. It would undermine our self-determination. But if they simply exist, and people voluntarily decide to use them, to control their own lives. Well, that's actually a way to help people with their self-determination.
I agree with your position that both phones/platforms are good, and that it comes down to what people want.
However I don't think the main differentiator is "just works" vs. "customizable". In my experience, they both "just work" for the vast majority of things. Buy a new iPhone or a new Droid and you'll be answering emails and browsing the web within minutes. And both are extensible via apps: the app market for iPhone is somewhat bigger, but on Android you have the option to install non-approved apps. These balance out to some extent. Overall, both platforms are fantastic in terms of extending your phone's capabilities, because the "top" apps (the best thousand apps, say) are available on both platforms.
To me, the big difference is which ecosystem you're buying in to. If you use Google services (gmail, Google Calendar, Google Voice, etc.) then Android is simply amazing. Within a minute of getting your new phone, all your contact details, appointments, and so on are all working perfectly. (One of the times where "the cloud" actually works/makes sense.) If you buy heavily into iTunes and the rest of the Apple universe, then an iPhone will seamlessly integrate into your workflow.
Of course you don't have to buy into their technology the way they want you to (you can use gmail from an iPhone just fine), but the experience is more streamlined if you do. If you don't buy into either ecosystem, then both types of smartphone seem pretty evenly matched, at least in my experience.
I do agree, by the way, that Android is more customizable and hackable. For some people that's an important differentiator. But I think for the public-at-large the bigger differentiator has to do with what ecosystem they've already bought into (or want to start using)...
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?
Are you sure that it will be?
This is the key, I think.
There is a generally-held belief among coders that "doing it right, the first time" and "rewriting this mess" will save money in the long-term, and that managers are idiots for not seeing that. This can, of course, be true. But it isn't always true, and coders are sometimes projecting their OCD-desire to have nice code (and sometimes suffering from "I didn't write it so it must be crap" syndrome) and assuming that this will translate into the dollars and cents that the company cares about.
Sometimes it's worth it; sometimes it's really not.
The thing about money is that it is both non-linear (double the money doesn't necessarily have double the value; sometimes it has more than double because you can overcome barriers; sometimes it has less because of diminishing returns, etc.) and temporally varying (inflation, time-value-of-money, etc.). Because of this, it can actually make economic sense to do something in a half-baked way, and "pay the price" later on (in terms of higher support costs, or even having to totally re-do a task/project). For example, in cases where you "absolutely need it now" (the value of having it finished soon becomes larger than down-the-road problems) or because you can't spare the cash right now (the value of using that money to do something else right now is larger than the down-the-road problems). (If you want a physics analogy, notice that money is not a conservative force-field: it is a path-dependent process...)
I'm not saying that it always makes sense to do slipshod work now and suffer the consequences later. There are plenty of dumb managers who over-value short-term gains compared to long-term. But that doesn't mean that the optimal solution is to spend massive effort up-front; there is such a thing as being too much of a perfectionist. And, importantly, the right answer will vary wildly depending on circumstances and the current state of the business. A startup may need a product to show (anything!) in order to secure more money. Doing it "right" will mean bankruptcy, which is far worse than having to keep fixing and maintaining a piece of shoddy code for years to come. A very well-established company, on the other hand, may do serious damage to their reputation if they release something buggy; and can probably afford to delay a release.
Actually figuring out the cost/benefit is not simple. In principle this is what good managers and good accountants are there to do: to figure out how best to allocate the finite resources. If you think you've found a way to reduce costs by implementing testing, then by all means show them the data that supports your case. However don't assume that just because testing will make the product better, that it actually makes sense from a business perspective.
The "Products & Technologies" are:
1. Verizon iPhone
2. BlackBerry PlayBook
3. Honeycomb Tablets
4. Even More Tablets
5. Chrome OS Notebooks
6. Phones with Dual-Core Processors
7. Mac App Store
8. Google TV: Take 2
9. Hulu for Magazines
10. Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Fusion Processors
11. Sony PlayStation Phone
12. Net Neutrality Rules in Practice
In terms of subject areas, this is:
1. Smartphone
2. Tablets
3. Tablets
4. Tablets
5. Netbooks
6. Smartphone
7. Content Access
8. Content Access
9. Content Access
10. Processors
11. Smartphone
12. Content Access
The base technology (processors, etc.) is under-represented compared to hot product categories (tablets and smartphones). Clearly they were more focused on "products" (and "business models") and not so focused on new "technologies".