It's really hard to know what Apple's motivation was or why the adapters weren't made available.
What I've been reading about Apple's much strict control over lightning devices form third parties leads me to believe they are trying to keep a genie in the bottle with regards to what can be done with the lightning port. Maybe it's about quality. Maybe it's about making money on everything and protecting their licensing.
I suspect it's all of it -- the good thing for Apple was that while the 30 pin connector did a lot, it could largely only do what the connector was wired for. Maybe the new connector has so much possible functionality that it opens up a can of worms for Apple and they don't want external file access or some other "missing" feature to turn up on Amazon for $5.99.
It'd be fun to be one of those stock analysts who gets to ask questions. "Have you estimated how much accessory revenue you lost the first two months of iPhone 5 sales when there were no accessories available?"
From what I've read, Apple has gotten really strict about lightning product licensing, product design and manufacturing, requiring only licensed factories to be able to make third party products.
To me this means that they are trying to limit what the connector can do by limiting who can make them, probably by trying to keep the interface chips locked down. This may be all "sane" business strategy when dealing with Chinese manufacturing (ie, keep quality high, minimize pirated products not paying licensing fees, etc) or it may all be designed to keep people from coming up with unique uses for the interface or producing functionality Apple doesn't "want" like external storage or some other feature.
IMHO, adoption of the new connector vs. legacy 30 pin use would happen pretty organically. An adapter is nice, but it's really very marginally useful in most circumstances (ie, not at all in stand-up dock type devices like boomboxes or clock radios) and ultimately device makers would simply stop making new 30 pin devices or come up with a *reverse* adapter that allowed 30 pins devices to work on lightning docks for all the legacy devices out there.
The people who have a real right to bitch are partners making expensive, high-end stuff who now have inventory "not designed for iPhone 5". How fun is it to be a Mercedes salesman pushing an $85,000 car that can't connect to an iPhone?
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
Or more likely, the fact that it was a huge success led the military to slap top secret over it and any aircraft maker selected to work on it was told of "permanent, irrevocable loss of DoD contracts", "lifetime bans on employment and security clearance", "intrusive FBI investigations and tax audits", "nationalization of defense critical assets" and "extremely likely criminal charges for treason, sedition or aiding the enemy tried in military courts with punishments handed out by military intelligence.."
The only thing I can think of that seems halfway rational (not right, but rational) is that its some way of finding "good" scientists whose working theories are more right than wrong. The guy whose theory proves unprovable is "going down the wrong road" and it would be pointless to continue supporting him, if you follow that line of reasoning.
But my understanding was that this kind of vetting was done BEFORE the experiment or study was done. You didn't fund studies with sketchy theories whose proof wasn't meaningful or were on paper very likely to fail to prove them.
I support the change to the lightning connector for the most part -- it's a mechanically superior connector to 30 pin and to micro-USB (which keyed and difficult to orient in low-light conditions due to its size).
But I think Apple really fucked up when it came to the lightning connector in terms of third party accessory availability, adapter availability and adapter functionality.
First of all, it should have been rolled out with the iPad 3 first. iPad physical connectivity and portability is less common and it would have given developers lead time to get all kinds of accessories ready for iPhone 5.
On the day that the phone was rolled out Apple should have had a 30 pin adapter available that replicated all thirty pin functionality outside of video. There's just no excuse for a delay of nearly a month for Apple-supplied adapters to an Apple-designed interface. They also should have had a lightning-HDMI adapter available (AFAIK, no HDMI interface is even announced let alone available).
My understanding is that the 30 pin adapter they are selling provides analog audio but not iPod control -- why is that? Either iPod control isn't available over lightning at all or there must be some other good reason the adapter couldn't provide it. The lack of iPod control breaks a huge amount of functionality in things that aren't easily swapped out (ie, cars).
Furthermore, Apple should have begun sharing Lightning technical info and approving designs with third parties so that they could have had devices ready for roll out. This whole "secret development" and the dog-and-pony introduction event has kind of run its course in many ways and keeping the interface a secret from partners really doesn't accomplish much except punish users.
It remains to be seen whether Apple will realize that a more restrictive adapter and strangleholds on the technology and licensing of it actually hurts them and the ecosystem more than it helps. Part of me wonders how much of this is pure profiteering on Apple's part (IMHO, that's too simple) but part of me also thinks that some of this is a desire to manage DRM and other types of control by restricting who can make a cable and what it can do.
If there aren't a lot of third party products, adapters, etc out before Christmas (ie, Thanksgiving...) this might be a kind of "Waterloo" for Apple.
I own a bunch of micro-USB devices and I think that connector blows, at least mechanically. It's keyed, so it requires a specific orientation, and it's small so it's hard to differentiate the orientation, especially once presbyopia sets in.
The lightning connector has no specific orientation and I find it much easier to connect, especially in the dark.
The jury's out on whether or not there's any technical advantage to lightning over micro-USB as a connector or connector protocol. I'm in the camp that says 30 pin had to go and lightning is a welcome change, but even as an iPhone fan I'm not convinced there isn't some profit motive behind all of this, especially all the restrictions and apparent secrecy surrounding the device and adapters.
I've read this in a number of places, but science, especially publicly funded science, seems increasingly doomed by "failure" -- ie, when scientists run a study to prove a link between A and B and the science tells them "A and B are not linked".
The headline is "Scientists fail to prove A and B" and the public opinion is that the scientists failed, as if it was a failure of effort, ability or character. It's never explained that the failure to link A and B *isn't* a failure really, it's a success of science because a theory was posited linking A and B and the relationship could not be scientifically proven.
It's further corrupted, especially in the case of the NIF, in that politicians and the general public (to the extent that the general public even comprehends what the NIF does...) has this kind of "profit motive" mindset where scientific endeavors are expected to provide some kind of return on investment to justify their existence, and the *science* and engineering they do provide isn't enough if their "mission" isn't a quick success.
And this will only get worse if Romney is elected. In the case of NIF, I'm not sure Obama/Dems are any better given the inherent anti-nuclear bias of the Democrats.
IMHO, the major problem with much science fiction seems to be the assumption that alien civilizations would be rational, organized and technically sophisticated.
It strikes me that Earth, at its current general level of technical evolution, could have manned bases on the moon and probably be well on our way to building bases on Mars if we had the typical science fictional level of social cohesion and if all the resources we spent on developing weapons and fighting wars were spent on outer space development.
For example, the US aircraft carrier fleet with planes alone is roughly a 90 billion dollar investment, and I would guess that when you factor in labor, training, and other resources you're looking at a 200 billion dollar outlay. And that's just for aircraft carriers.
Contrast that with NASA's 18 billion dollar budget and the defense departments 700 billion dollar overall budget, and you can see how if the world alone was spending on space instead of war we'd easily have Moon and Mars capability developed and deployed.
I would assume that other worlds would have the same problems we have the lead us to believe we're better off with a huge military than the ability to colonize Mars. And who's to say that other worlds would even get as far as we did?
It's almost an accident that we're as developed as we are, most of modernity worldwide owes its roots to Europe and the Enlightenment. If that doesn't happen -- the plague doesn't wipe out the population of Europe with all the social and demographic changes this brings, if the church crushes Luther and protestantism, we could be still living hand-to-mouth and dreaming of the luxury of Rome.
I work at a SMB IT consulting company and I can't tell you how much money we make fixing "standards-based, transparent and reusable technical foundations".
Usually they are crappy, low-end, unmaintained and undocumented piles of OSS whitebox dogshit that some self-styled guru implemented. Of course the solutions we replace this with are more expensive, but the owners are happy to pay because they recognize what a burden it is to be saddled with something like that.
That being said, the OSS aspect of this isn''t necessarily the problem, the problem is people with little or no knowledge or background "invested a few hours of research and setup effort" when a "a few hours" isn't good enough.
In this case, I think the parent poster was largely correct -- it's way better for the business to have something that works that costs more than to have something brain damaged that nobody knows how to upgrade because the implementer was naive and inexperienced.
In the 19th century when you worked for the steel mill, the mine or maybe the rail car manufacturer, you probably lived in the company town. In housing owned by the company. And you shopped at stores owned by the company. Since you did all your business with the company, you got paid in company scrip. And chances are you didn't make quite enough to make ends meet, so you went into debt, which they deducted from your paycheck.
It's a little hard to argue what Fascist economics looks like; the only two working examples of a Fascist government were Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Both parties started out at least nominally socialist ("Nazi" is a rough shortening of the full German name of the party, the National Socialist German Worker's Party"), but it's not really clear whether this was *just* a pose to undermine other left-wing parties prior to Nazi ascendance or whether it actually was a meaningful aspect of Nazi ideology. At least early on there were a number of economic initiatives (The VW and some other consumer products) oriented towards German workers.
It's also important to recognize that business was facing some pretty stark choices as well -- it wasn't a given that Germany or Italy wouldn't have gone Soviet-style communist or at least radically socialist. For the moneyed business class, joining up with the Fascists in an uncertain time was less about philosophy than finding the guy who wasn't completely about taking away your business and stripping you of your wealth.
Regardless, though, both countries had power-hungry leaders who wanted their countries on war footing and put them into major wars fairly soon after taking power. It's really hard to know what Germany or Italy would have been like economically with Fascist governments over a longer period, especially Germany. To this day there is a lot of cooperation between German unions, businesses and the government.
But is the conventional army in Iran anything special?
I seem to remember reading around the time of the riots that occurred after the last election that the military followed the typical model in dictatorships. While the army is large and has its own command structure, it's relatively low tech compared to the Revolutionary Guard which has a disproportionate amount of the good equipment.
The conventional army is the kind of bulk, low-tech force designed to discourage enemies from conventional attack -- lots of guys with Kalashnikovs and mortars and a collection of outdated tanks and airplanes. The RG has all the newer equipment meant to provide a Praetorian Guard kind of counter-balance to the military should they decide change the rules.
Is the issue the scientific process, or is the issue the legal system?
It strikes me as the latter. It seems like a reasonable person would easily conclude that a scientific work in progress would contain a lot of incomplete data, a lot of conflicting theories, explanations and incomplete analysis of the data and the project itself.
However, the "reasonable person" conclusion doesn't seem like any kind of barrier from a legal system which makes it very easy for nearly anyone of means to file broad lawsuits by cherry-picking information and forcing defendants to organize expensive, complex defenses.
I think it's important from a justice perspective for anyone to be able to bring a civil suit, however, I think in some cases the rules should be changed to force some kind of automatic review of civil cases whenever some set of standards, like a large asymmetry between plaintiff and defendant resources or damage claims and require "the big guy" to more clearly explain their losses.
All that being said, I think a lot of scientists need to stick to science and be a little more muted with their political opinions. When scientists are extremely strident with their political views it automatically calls into question the accuracy of their science, especially in light of news stories like the huge increase in fraudulent results (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/science/study-finds-fraud-is-widespread-in-retracted-scientific-papers.html).
Scientists who stick to science will tend to be seen more as neutral experts explaining phenomenon and not as biased experts structuring their science to fit their opinions. Furthermore it probably helps the scientists as well, since having a strong political opinion on your research subject is only likely to increase the risk that you'll be tempted to massage your results, conclusions or worse instead of having to face some humiliation for both your theories and your opinions from being repudiated by your own science.
Gary Taubes has done some great reporting in the nutrition field and its remarkable how much the science is weakened when scientists hold strong opinions without strong science to back them up. See his article in Science on salt research for an example.
I would instead make the argument that Microsoft, as a software company founded and run by a software developer, is one place where the culture isn't as sclerotic and where they realize that their engineering talent is actually important. Basically they're doing it right.
But they're also in high-stakes competition for the cream of the crop, both technically and otherwise, with deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon, Apple and others. So they're not *just* doing it right (or much better than average) their niche faces significant market competition.
That being said, I've worked plenty of places where that just wasn't the case. "Soft skills" were important on paper, but they really weren't all that important. It was always a case of "this is how much we'll pay".
And it's also a recurring meme throughout the IT and engineering, which to me means there's something to this -- it's not just that the people remaining are technically weak and impersonal.
If you can't find people to hire, you're not offering enough money. If designing widgets or software had an advantageous salary (relative to marketing or finance), people would go into this field.
If you have decent people but they need to work with a new technology, train them. Even if they just have potential or are pretty green, train them. I can't remember when this changed, but at some point companies just stopped training and decided that they would only hire pre-trained people or worse yet, support a gladiatorial culture where workers are expected to train themselves or get replaced with 20 year olds who "already know it".
You have to change the sclerotic culture of business so that it's not a class of financial engineers and marketers who are treated as an aristocracy while engineers and more general labor are treated as plebs. I had a telling conversation with my wife, a senior marketing executive, about this. She basically came out and said that engineers were only worth so much money, period, and if they couldn't be had for that figure then they needed to be imported. But sales and marketing executives have no such cap, and they need to be paid whatever it takes to hire the right person. And she works for a company where there would be no product without engineers!!
...the original Mac had the basis for this designed in from the beginning. The Mac had a graphics region (65k x 65k pixels) larger than the display region. The window was a display port on this region.
As initially hyped, er, reported, nobody could make a call on the iPhone 4 and if you held onto your phone with more than 2 fingers you lost not only all your wireless signals, but you also started to lose your place in the space-time continuum.
That one got so bad Steve Jobs actually held a press conference to show the world that, yes, Apple had RF engineers and facilities and so on.
After some software fixes and the bumper case (which I actually liked and used with a 4 and 4S) the problem was never heard from again.
I don't even know how "real" the problem was -- I bought a 4 later in the release cycle (March?) and I always used one with a case anyway, but I never had any RF problems with it at all.
It's only been available briefly, but it strikes me that "MapGate" is like "AntennaGate" was for the iPhone 4 -- representative of a real problem, but one that is blown well out of proportion.
Personally, I haven't had a problem using the new Apple Maps app -- it has found locations correctly and accurately. The navigation feature has worked as well, although it seems to suffer from some of the same routing issues that ALL GPS devices have -- the routes they choose are all reasonable, but they don't stand up to a local's innate routing ability which can balance details that won't fit in a map application (i.e., which route is fastest AND has a good liquor store which sells imports in 500 ml cans).
Google Maps didn't have my office address on streets for nearly 4 years. Admittedly it was a new development, but 4 years? And I've used plenty of standalone GPS systems with glitches -- the last time I was in Park City skiing, the GPS supplied with the car put the hotel on the wrong side of the road.
The photos of warped satellite views seem entirely unsurprising given that the 3D perspective is computer generated and there are probably adjustments that need to be made in the data or the rendering process for some locations. It's hard to see this as a show stopper, especially considering the Google alternatives are easily available and I don't know who uses the 3D satellite views for turn-by-turn navigation anyway.
I also think Apple's app has improvements -- the app rotates between landscape and portrait, the street map is vector based, allowing for faster zooming and panning, and overall it appears to have superior design/typography. And it has navigation.
It's not hard to see the glitches worked out over time, although the hard part for Apple will be coordinating the partners to make it happen faster than the typical evolutionary scale. Presumably Apple has a licensing agreement that allows them to fix the mapping data themselves and not just send flagged glitches to TomTom for them to fix as they see fit.
Once we accept and refuse to question the low fat dietary paradigm coupled with the "energy balance" paradigm that pushes us to eat less and burn more calories, we end up with all kinds of crazy enemies.
Fast Food becomes the enemy because it's greasy, but not because most of what they serve has added sugar (the catsup is sky high in sugars) and much of the volume of a fast food meal are simple starches (big buns, french fries, sugary drinks).
Activities like video games become an enemy because you're "not burning enough calories" to use up the excess of what you've consumed.
What I find truly interesting are the cultural tie-ins to low fat/exercise. One of the core memes of Christianity is that there can be no redemption without suffering. This plays right into low fat/exercise. Redemption is weight loss. Food without fat and salt tastes terrible. There's part of your suffering. Eating less and being hungry? That's another part of your suffering. Exercise is the other part of the trinity of suffering, and it contributes to the effects of hunger and being tired, making that suffering increase.
And of course when this doesn't work, it's a failure of character. Weak morals. Lack of discipline. Gluttony. Sloth.
And when the employee decides to just quit, what do you do then? Or if they decide to just not provide it to you, smash it or otherwise wreck it (how long does an iPhone have to be submerged in water to render the electronics inoperable)?
Why isn't everything modular and swappable/replacable?
I think from an energy savings perspective that designing the entire *vehicle* to be upgradable (power train, interior, braking, suspension components, etc) would be a bigger savings than the throwaway model we have now. Even the body panels shouldn't be that difficult within reason.
The only reason this isn't practical now is that the components like transmissions and engines are largely design to fit specific frame platforms and once they stop making a given platform, the existing components available to rebuild the car are either rebuilt themselves, used or super expensive because they are no longer made and their replacements won't fit without custom machining.
Car makers design in a certain amount of modularity when they build cars, so they can sell a Cadillac, a Buick, and a Chevrolet from 50%+ of the same parts with only interior and finish components changing.
I think the entire car should be modular. Why shouldn't a newer/better drive train be something I could drop into my car? If they kept the mounting system the same I should be able to unless the dimensions of the new drivetrain are radically different (a platform designed around a sub-3 liter engine shouldn't be expected to accommodate a 6 liter engine).
The same goes for interior components, body panels, suspension components (although I expect there are legitimate limits relative to frame design).
If you could essentially (and relatively simply) upgrade your car with a new interior and new drive train with just those components, the energy savings in not building an entirely new car seems like it would be huge.
The part where they make it sound like Apple is shitting all over 4 billion people on purpose, as if all the countries losing traffic and street view were places where every one of those 4 billion people all had iPhones.
I'd bet 3 billion or so of those people don't have clean water or flush toilets, it's hard to see not having traffic updates as being the final thing that drives them over the edge.
Let's assume that the Sandia technique/technology results in sustained net-positive fusion by the end of 2013. The results are so positive that a small-scale concept plant that will push to the grid gets built, by, say 2020.
This works well enough and there's enough refinement that a full-scale 8 GW plant can be built. By what, 2035? This plant is so successful that by 2050 there are maybe 4-5 more built an in operation.
So we have a lead time of 2050 for less than 50 GW of power. Considering total production is something like 1300 GW, it hardly seems like a threat to anything or a source of the vaunted "free" energy.
Even if you manage increase production by a factor of 10 to 500 GW capacity, what will fund the grid expansion to deliver all this free energy? Will the cost of electrically powered stuff go down -- or up, now that "everything" is made to run on electricity and the demand for rare earths, copper and other related materials goes way up?
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It's really hard to know what Apple's motivation was or why the adapters weren't made available.
What I've been reading about Apple's much strict control over lightning devices form third parties leads me to believe they are trying to keep a genie in the bottle with regards to what can be done with the lightning port. Maybe it's about quality. Maybe it's about making money on everything and protecting their licensing.
I suspect it's all of it -- the good thing for Apple was that while the 30 pin connector did a lot, it could largely only do what the connector was wired for. Maybe the new connector has so much possible functionality that it opens up a can of worms for Apple and they don't want external file access or some other "missing" feature to turn up on Amazon for $5.99.
It'd be fun to be one of those stock analysts who gets to ask questions. "Have you estimated how much accessory revenue you lost the first two months of iPhone 5 sales when there were no accessories available?"
From what I've read, Apple has gotten really strict about lightning product licensing, product design and manufacturing, requiring only licensed factories to be able to make third party products.
To me this means that they are trying to limit what the connector can do by limiting who can make them, probably by trying to keep the interface chips locked down. This may be all "sane" business strategy when dealing with Chinese manufacturing (ie, keep quality high, minimize pirated products not paying licensing fees, etc) or it may all be designed to keep people from coming up with unique uses for the interface or producing functionality Apple doesn't "want" like external storage or some other feature.
IMHO, adoption of the new connector vs. legacy 30 pin use would happen pretty organically. An adapter is nice, but it's really very marginally useful in most circumstances (ie, not at all in stand-up dock type devices like boomboxes or clock radios) and ultimately device makers would simply stop making new 30 pin devices or come up with a *reverse* adapter that allowed 30 pins devices to work on lightning docks for all the legacy devices out there.
The people who have a real right to bitch are partners making expensive, high-end stuff who now have inventory "not designed for iPhone 5". How fun is it to be a Mercedes salesman pushing an $85,000 car that can't connect to an iPhone?
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
Or more likely, the fact that it was a huge success led the military to slap top secret over it and any aircraft maker selected to work on it was told of "permanent, irrevocable loss of DoD contracts", "lifetime bans on employment and security clearance", "intrusive FBI investigations and tax audits", "nationalization of defense critical assets" and "extremely likely criminal charges for treason, sedition or aiding the enemy tried in military courts with punishments handed out by military intelligence.."
That's a kludge, and it also means nothing relative to all the other non-Samsung micro-USB devices and cables I use.
Why is this?
The only thing I can think of that seems halfway rational (not right, but rational) is that its some way of finding "good" scientists whose working theories are more right than wrong. The guy whose theory proves unprovable is "going down the wrong road" and it would be pointless to continue supporting him, if you follow that line of reasoning.
But my understanding was that this kind of vetting was done BEFORE the experiment or study was done. You didn't fund studies with sketchy theories whose proof wasn't meaningful or were on paper very likely to fail to prove them.
I support the change to the lightning connector for the most part -- it's a mechanically superior connector to 30 pin and to micro-USB (which keyed and difficult to orient in low-light conditions due to its size).
But I think Apple really fucked up when it came to the lightning connector in terms of third party accessory availability, adapter availability and adapter functionality.
First of all, it should have been rolled out with the iPad 3 first. iPad physical connectivity and portability is less common and it would have given developers lead time to get all kinds of accessories ready for iPhone 5.
On the day that the phone was rolled out Apple should have had a 30 pin adapter available that replicated all thirty pin functionality outside of video. There's just no excuse for a delay of nearly a month for Apple-supplied adapters to an Apple-designed interface. They also should have had a lightning-HDMI adapter available (AFAIK, no HDMI interface is even announced let alone available).
My understanding is that the 30 pin adapter they are selling provides analog audio but not iPod control -- why is that? Either iPod control isn't available over lightning at all or there must be some other good reason the adapter couldn't provide it. The lack of iPod control breaks a huge amount of functionality in things that aren't easily swapped out (ie, cars).
Furthermore, Apple should have begun sharing Lightning technical info and approving designs with third parties so that they could have had devices ready for roll out. This whole "secret development" and the dog-and-pony introduction event has kind of run its course in many ways and keeping the interface a secret from partners really doesn't accomplish much except punish users.
It remains to be seen whether Apple will realize that a more restrictive adapter and strangleholds on the technology and licensing of it actually hurts them and the ecosystem more than it helps. Part of me wonders how much of this is pure profiteering on Apple's part (IMHO, that's too simple) but part of me also thinks that some of this is a desire to manage DRM and other types of control by restricting who can make a cable and what it can do.
If there aren't a lot of third party products, adapters, etc out before Christmas (ie, Thanksgiving...) this might be a kind of "Waterloo" for Apple.
I own a bunch of micro-USB devices and I think that connector blows, at least mechanically. It's keyed, so it requires a specific orientation, and it's small so it's hard to differentiate the orientation, especially once presbyopia sets in.
The lightning connector has no specific orientation and I find it much easier to connect, especially in the dark.
The jury's out on whether or not there's any technical advantage to lightning over micro-USB as a connector or connector protocol. I'm in the camp that says 30 pin had to go and lightning is a welcome change, but even as an iPhone fan I'm not convinced there isn't some profit motive behind all of this, especially all the restrictions and apparent secrecy surrounding the device and adapters.
I've read this in a number of places, but science, especially publicly funded science, seems increasingly doomed by "failure" -- ie, when scientists run a study to prove a link between A and B and the science tells them "A and B are not linked".
The headline is "Scientists fail to prove A and B" and the public opinion is that the scientists failed, as if it was a failure of effort, ability or character. It's never explained that the failure to link A and B *isn't* a failure really, it's a success of science because a theory was posited linking A and B and the relationship could not be scientifically proven.
It's further corrupted, especially in the case of the NIF, in that politicians and the general public (to the extent that the general public even comprehends what the NIF does...) has this kind of "profit motive" mindset where scientific endeavors are expected to provide some kind of return on investment to justify their existence, and the *science* and engineering they do provide isn't enough if their "mission" isn't a quick success.
And this will only get worse if Romney is elected. In the case of NIF, I'm not sure Obama/Dems are any better given the inherent anti-nuclear bias of the Democrats.
IMHO, the major problem with much science fiction seems to be the assumption that alien civilizations would be rational, organized and technically sophisticated.
It strikes me that Earth, at its current general level of technical evolution, could have manned bases on the moon and probably be well on our way to building bases on Mars if we had the typical science fictional level of social cohesion and if all the resources we spent on developing weapons and fighting wars were spent on outer space development.
For example, the US aircraft carrier fleet with planes alone is roughly a 90 billion dollar investment, and I would guess that when you factor in labor, training, and other resources you're looking at a 200 billion dollar outlay. And that's just for aircraft carriers.
Contrast that with NASA's 18 billion dollar budget and the defense departments 700 billion dollar overall budget, and you can see how if the world alone was spending on space instead of war we'd easily have Moon and Mars capability developed and deployed.
I would assume that other worlds would have the same problems we have the lead us to believe we're better off with a huge military than the ability to colonize Mars. And who's to say that other worlds would even get as far as we did?
It's almost an accident that we're as developed as we are, most of modernity worldwide owes its roots to Europe and the Enlightenment. If that doesn't happen -- the plague doesn't wipe out the population of Europe with all the social and demographic changes this brings, if the church crushes Luther and protestantism, we could be still living hand-to-mouth and dreaming of the luxury of Rome.
I work at a SMB IT consulting company and I can't tell you how much money we make fixing "standards-based, transparent and reusable technical foundations".
Usually they are crappy, low-end, unmaintained and undocumented piles of OSS whitebox dogshit that some self-styled guru implemented. Of course the solutions we replace this with are more expensive, but the owners are happy to pay because they recognize what a burden it is to be saddled with something like that.
That being said, the OSS aspect of this isn''t necessarily the problem, the problem is people with little or no knowledge or background "invested a few hours of research and setup effort" when a "a few hours" isn't good enough.
In this case, I think the parent poster was largely correct -- it's way better for the business to have something that works that costs more than to have something brain damaged that nobody knows how to upgrade because the implementer was naive and inexperienced.
In the 19th century when you worked for the steel mill, the mine or maybe the rail car manufacturer, you probably lived in the company town. In housing owned by the company. And you shopped at stores owned by the company. Since you did all your business with the company, you got paid in company scrip. And chances are you didn't make quite enough to make ends meet, so you went into debt, which they deducted from your paycheck.
It's a little hard to argue what Fascist economics looks like; the only two working examples of a Fascist government were Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Both parties started out at least nominally socialist ("Nazi" is a rough shortening of the full German name of the party, the National Socialist German Worker's Party"), but it's not really clear whether this was *just* a pose to undermine other left-wing parties prior to Nazi ascendance or whether it actually was a meaningful aspect of Nazi ideology. At least early on there were a number of economic initiatives (The VW and some other consumer products) oriented towards German workers.
It's also important to recognize that business was facing some pretty stark choices as well -- it wasn't a given that Germany or Italy wouldn't have gone Soviet-style communist or at least radically socialist. For the moneyed business class, joining up with the Fascists in an uncertain time was less about philosophy than finding the guy who wasn't completely about taking away your business and stripping you of your wealth.
Regardless, though, both countries had power-hungry leaders who wanted their countries on war footing and put them into major wars fairly soon after taking power. It's really hard to know what Germany or Italy would have been like economically with Fascist governments over a longer period, especially Germany. To this day there is a lot of cooperation between German unions, businesses and the government.
But is the conventional army in Iran anything special?
I seem to remember reading around the time of the riots that occurred after the last election that the military followed the typical model in dictatorships. While the army is large and has its own command structure, it's relatively low tech compared to the Revolutionary Guard which has a disproportionate amount of the good equipment.
The conventional army is the kind of bulk, low-tech force designed to discourage enemies from conventional attack -- lots of guys with Kalashnikovs and mortars and a collection of outdated tanks and airplanes. The RG has all the newer equipment meant to provide a Praetorian Guard kind of counter-balance to the military should they decide change the rules.
Is the issue the scientific process, or is the issue the legal system?
It strikes me as the latter. It seems like a reasonable person would easily conclude that a scientific work in progress would contain a lot of incomplete data, a lot of conflicting theories, explanations and incomplete analysis of the data and the project itself.
However, the "reasonable person" conclusion doesn't seem like any kind of barrier from a legal system which makes it very easy for nearly anyone of means to file broad lawsuits by cherry-picking information and forcing defendants to organize expensive, complex defenses.
I think it's important from a justice perspective for anyone to be able to bring a civil suit, however, I think in some cases the rules should be changed to force some kind of automatic review of civil cases whenever some set of standards, like a large asymmetry between plaintiff and defendant resources or damage claims and require "the big guy" to more clearly explain their losses.
All that being said, I think a lot of scientists need to stick to science and be a little more muted with their political opinions. When scientists are extremely strident with their political views it automatically calls into question the accuracy of their science, especially in light of news stories like the huge increase in fraudulent results (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/science/study-finds-fraud-is-widespread-in-retracted-scientific-papers.html).
Scientists who stick to science will tend to be seen more as neutral experts explaining phenomenon and not as biased experts structuring their science to fit their opinions. Furthermore it probably helps the scientists as well, since having a strong political opinion on your research subject is only likely to increase the risk that you'll be tempted to massage your results, conclusions or worse instead of having to face some humiliation for both your theories and your opinions from being repudiated by your own science.
Gary Taubes has done some great reporting in the nutrition field and its remarkable how much the science is weakened when scientists hold strong opinions without strong science to back them up. See his article in Science on salt research for an example.
I would instead make the argument that Microsoft, as a software company founded and run by a software developer, is one place where the culture isn't as sclerotic and where they realize that their engineering talent is actually important. Basically they're doing it right.
But they're also in high-stakes competition for the cream of the crop, both technically and otherwise, with deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon, Apple and others. So they're not *just* doing it right (or much better than average) their niche faces significant market competition.
That being said, I've worked plenty of places where that just wasn't the case. "Soft skills" were important on paper, but they really weren't all that important. It was always a case of "this is how much we'll pay".
And it's also a recurring meme throughout the IT and engineering, which to me means there's something to this -- it's not just that the people remaining are technically weak and impersonal.
...they've forgotten how it actually works.
If you can't find people to hire, you're not offering enough money. If designing widgets or software had an advantageous salary (relative to marketing or finance), people would go into this field.
If you have decent people but they need to work with a new technology, train them. Even if they just have potential or are pretty green, train them. I can't remember when this changed, but at some point companies just stopped training and decided that they would only hire pre-trained people or worse yet, support a gladiatorial culture where workers are expected to train themselves or get replaced with 20 year olds who "already know it".
You have to change the sclerotic culture of business so that it's not a class of financial engineers and marketers who are treated as an aristocracy while engineers and more general labor are treated as plebs. I had a telling conversation with my wife, a senior marketing executive, about this. She basically came out and said that engineers were only worth so much money, period, and if they couldn't be had for that figure then they needed to be imported. But sales and marketing executives have no such cap, and they need to be paid whatever it takes to hire the right person. And she works for a company where there would be no product without engineers!!
...the original Mac had the basis for this designed in from the beginning. The Mac had a graphics region (65k x 65k pixels) larger than the display region. The window was a display port on this region.
Remember that one?
As initially hyped, er, reported, nobody could make a call on the iPhone 4 and if you held onto your phone with more than 2 fingers you lost not only all your wireless signals, but you also started to lose your place in the space-time continuum.
That one got so bad Steve Jobs actually held a press conference to show the world that, yes, Apple had RF engineers and facilities and so on.
After some software fixes and the bumper case (which I actually liked and used with a 4 and 4S) the problem was never heard from again.
I don't even know how "real" the problem was -- I bought a 4 later in the release cycle (March?) and I always used one with a case anyway, but I never had any RF problems with it at all.
It's only been available briefly, but it strikes me that "MapGate" is like "AntennaGate" was for the iPhone 4 -- representative of a real problem, but one that is blown well out of proportion.
Personally, I haven't had a problem using the new Apple Maps app -- it has found locations correctly and accurately. The navigation feature has worked as well, although it seems to suffer from some of the same routing issues that ALL GPS devices have -- the routes they choose are all reasonable, but they don't stand up to a local's innate routing ability which can balance details that won't fit in a map application (i.e., which route is fastest AND has a good liquor store which sells imports in 500 ml cans).
Google Maps didn't have my office address on streets for nearly 4 years. Admittedly it was a new development, but 4 years? And I've used plenty of standalone GPS systems with glitches -- the last time I was in Park City skiing, the GPS supplied with the car put the hotel on the wrong side of the road.
The photos of warped satellite views seem entirely unsurprising given that the 3D perspective is computer generated and there are probably adjustments that need to be made in the data or the rendering process for some locations. It's hard to see this as a show stopper, especially considering the Google alternatives are easily available and I don't know who uses the 3D satellite views for turn-by-turn navigation anyway.
I also think Apple's app has improvements -- the app rotates between landscape and portrait, the street map is vector based, allowing for faster zooming and panning, and overall it appears to have superior design/typography. And it has navigation.
It's not hard to see the glitches worked out over time, although the hard part for Apple will be coordinating the partners to make it happen faster than the typical evolutionary scale. Presumably Apple has a licensing agreement that allows them to fix the mapping data themselves and not just send flagged glitches to TomTom for them to fix as they see fit.
Once we accept and refuse to question the low fat dietary paradigm coupled with the "energy balance" paradigm that pushes us to eat less and burn more calories, we end up with all kinds of crazy enemies.
Fast Food becomes the enemy because it's greasy, but not because most of what they serve has added sugar (the catsup is sky high in sugars) and much of the volume of a fast food meal are simple starches (big buns, french fries, sugary drinks).
Activities like video games become an enemy because you're "not burning enough calories" to use up the excess of what you've consumed.
What I find truly interesting are the cultural tie-ins to low fat/exercise. One of the core memes of Christianity is that there can be no redemption without suffering. This plays right into low fat/exercise. Redemption is weight loss. Food without fat and salt tastes terrible. There's part of your suffering. Eating less and being hungry? That's another part of your suffering. Exercise is the other part of the trinity of suffering, and it contributes to the effects of hunger and being tired, making that suffering increase.
And of course when this doesn't work, it's a failure of character. Weak morals. Lack of discipline. Gluttony. Sloth.
And when the employee decides to just quit, what do you do then? Or if they decide to just not provide it to you, smash it or otherwise wreck it (how long does an iPhone have to be submerged in water to render the electronics inoperable)?
Why isn't everything modular and swappable/replacable?
I think from an energy savings perspective that designing the entire *vehicle* to be upgradable (power train, interior, braking, suspension components, etc) would be a bigger savings than the throwaway model we have now. Even the body panels shouldn't be that difficult within reason.
The only reason this isn't practical now is that the components like transmissions and engines are largely design to fit specific frame platforms and once they stop making a given platform, the existing components available to rebuild the car are either rebuilt themselves, used or super expensive because they are no longer made and their replacements won't fit without custom machining.
Car makers design in a certain amount of modularity when they build cars, so they can sell a Cadillac, a Buick, and a Chevrolet from 50%+ of the same parts with only interior and finish components changing.
I think the entire car should be modular. Why shouldn't a newer/better drive train be something I could drop into my car? If they kept the mounting system the same I should be able to unless the dimensions of the new drivetrain are radically different (a platform designed around a sub-3 liter engine shouldn't be expected to accommodate a 6 liter engine).
The same goes for interior components, body panels, suspension components (although I expect there are legitimate limits relative to frame design).
If you could essentially (and relatively simply) upgrade your car with a new interior and new drive train with just those components, the energy savings in not building an entirely new car seems like it would be huge.
The part where they make it sound like Apple is shitting all over 4 billion people on purpose, as if all the countries losing traffic and street view were places where every one of those 4 billion people all had iPhones.
I'd bet 3 billion or so of those people don't have clean water or flush toilets, it's hard to see not having traffic updates as being the final thing that drives them over the edge.
Good luck finding my submarine. Your carrier? Easy.
I thought a submarine with a bunch of nuclear cruise missiles was a pretty intimidating item, provided you've got the brass to use 'em.
And how low cost will it be actually?
Let's assume that the Sandia technique/technology results in sustained net-positive fusion by the end of 2013. The results are so positive that a small-scale concept plant that will push to the grid gets built, by, say 2020.
This works well enough and there's enough refinement that a full-scale 8 GW plant can be built. By what, 2035? This plant is so successful that by 2050 there are maybe 4-5 more built an in operation.
So we have a lead time of 2050 for less than 50 GW of power. Considering total production is something like 1300 GW, it hardly seems like a threat to anything or a source of the vaunted "free" energy.
Even if you manage increase production by a factor of 10 to 500 GW capacity, what will fund the grid expansion to deliver all this free energy? Will the cost of electrically powered stuff go down -- or up, now that "everything" is made to run on electricity and the demand for rare earths, copper and other related materials goes way up?