One possible oversight in his evidence is that it is based on wills. Did medieval peasant poor do much in the way of will writing? Not having a pot to piss in, there would be far less need, incentive, or means to have one prepared. On the other hand, people of means had both the reason and the means to prepare wills. So we should expect that large, wealthy families would be over-represented in the available historical documents, and large, piss-poor families without any wills would be systematically underrepresented in the available evidence.
Has he even attempted to correct for this possible bias, or is he just running with the raw uncorrected sample I wonder?
His grasping at genetics suggests a blithe disregard for basic scientific methodology like Occam's Razor (not to mention that it smacks of social darwinism - the idea that the rich are rich because they're genetically superior to the poor, so the poor should be allowed to die off as part of natural selection). He thinks that there are genes for capitalist behavior more prevalent among the wealthy than the poor? As another poster suggested, if this were true then wealth based polygamous societies would have spawned the industrial revolution long before the 19th century. After all, the wealthy in those societies have been out reproducing the poor for hundreds if not thousands of years because rich men can buy multiple wives and have 50 or more children.
The simpler and therefore preferred explanation is that:
1. People with wealth behave differently than people without wealth because the wealthy have many more resources at their disposal, not because they are genetically superior in some unspecified sense. 2. The rich didn't out reproduce the poor uniquely in England (he notes that the opposite is true in historical records from Japan). Rather, the poor out reproduced the rich just as in Asia, but his data are just systematically biased because desperately poor illiterate people with 11 kids don't pay lawyers to make up a useless will to ensure that their sole possessions, the clothes they died in, are fairly divided among their heirs.
Hate to say it, but maybe the Janjaweed have a point in Darfur....
You are aware that they're engaged in a campaign of systematic rape and murder along racial lines right? So the "point" that they have is what, mass rape? race war? genocide?
Nobody drank water before the introduction of coffee and tea in Europe. They drank Ale, and lots of it. The alcohol content was an effective anti-microbial that made the otherwise pestilential water safe to drink.
So the transition was not from water to tea and coffee, but from several quarts of ale a day (including children) to a pint or two or ale and pint or two of tea or coffee. Europe became much more alert not just because of the introduction of caffeine, but because of the concomitant reduction in alcohol consumption.
Sadly such christians are the majority - for example roman catholics are required to believe literally in the resurrection and ascension of jesus or they are not catholics in good standing. That's a billion christians right there.
If you reload the same software and it happens again and again, guess what? You're an idiot and at some point you stop receiving support for that problem.
Not until you've already wasted the provider's time and money with at least two service visits/phone swaps. Pretty sure AT&T and Apple would like to avoid this.
The iPhone is an upmarket device. You missed the key scenario:
Company allows employees/partners to purchase their own smart phones and use them for work - heck, the company will even pay the monthly bill - as long as these devices do email and allow you read, edit, and email word docs - via Google Apps on the iPhone. Well heeled employees/partners buy an iPhone both to do work and as a way cool status symbol - "`What's that on your phone Rick?' `Oh, I'm just watching SpiderMan 3'"
Very few companies are going to buy all their employees an iPhone, but this downmarket, low cost IT niche is not what Apple is targeting with the device in its first release. Apple has always targeted the taste makers of the high end of the market in order to build mindshare. Then they sell the scaled down less expensive version to the mass market a year or two later. cf. the iPod -> shuffle.
Polar bears are strong swimmers, but they can't swim indefinitely - they need ice floes to haul out on, rest and hunt. With greater ice melting, there's more open ocean, and a greater chance that ice bears will be unable to find ice before tiring and drowning.
Like it or not, politics is where the rubber meets the road. If there is going to be any action to change human behavior, it is certainly not going to come from scientists themselves even though they do the actual science. Any significant change in behavior is going to come from policy makers creating regulations based on what the majority of scientists tell them.
Look at the reduction in atmospheric pollution in the US at the end of the last century. It was almost entirely due to the standards introduced by the Clean Air Act. Scientists provided the research showing that industrial activities, automobiles, etc, where lowering air quality in many areas. However, it took politicians to take this science and enforce behavioral changes among people. Scientists do science but they don't create policy - politicians do.
Now, look at climate change. The GGGP said (adding comic flair) "[Those GW nuts think the planet's getting warmer. But look at Canada -- it's just the opposite.]" [1]
you can't say, "That's just anecdotal. If you look at the set of ALL industrialized terran planets in which greedy capitalists mercilessly dump CO2 into the atmosphere, they're hot as hell.[2]"
but you can say "that's just one location on a very large planet, and climate models do in fact predict that some regions will get colder but the global *mean* temperature will rise."
If they stopped playing IBM's old closed architecture game, and leveraged the manufacturing power of the near east by allowing vendors like HP, Dell, Toshiba, and Sony build machines that run OS X; maybe we could have a duopoly in the Operating System market.
This is raised time and again as if it would somehow magically be profitable for Apple to hand generic pc manufacturers all the markup that Apple now keeps on hardware running Mac OS X. Apple could charge manufacturers no more than $50.00 a box for an OS X license - probably significantly less - because they would be in direct competition with MS, and that's what MS charges. Apple's profit on even mid range Macs is much higher than this - a couple of hundred. Apple would have to instantly start selling 4 to 10 times as many OS X systems just to maintain parity with their current profits.
For all the people speculating on what Apple should do - consider the distinct possibility that they've already considered your idea and run the actual numbers, and that's why they aren't doing it!
Speaking of fads (don't know if you're really serious about the iPod being a fad btw) does anyone really think that Ajax is the real future of computing as Graham claims? Maybe his little Web 2.0 startup bubble is causing some hyperbolic groupthink. In the article he provides a link to an Ajax photo editing "replacement" for Photoshop. Have you tried this thing? It is incredibly slow - I'm on a broadband connection that routinely does 1MB/sec downstream - and that slowness was just the half assed basic stuff it does, which in no way compares to real professional photo editing.
Ajax may take over the grandma space - truly basic things like email and very simple document editing - but once we get past the level of tasks that computers on professional's desks did 20 years ago, people are going to want desktops. Don't get me started on gaming, the traditional driver of increased desktop horsepower - does anyone seriously think that Ajax is going to eat game software houses' lunch?
The desktop software market is just going to move to the high end - which is the most profitable part of the market, leaving Web 2.0 to be the shareware (or adware) of the new millenium.
Common misconception - the actual marginal cost of each additional sale is its *support* component not the cost of copying. Each additional copy costs the manufacturer next to nothing only if the software manufacturer provides no support with each new sale.
If, as you admit, Apple was able to do this before Microsoft, then Microsoft cannot be, as you claim a *necessary* evil. It may be necessary for there to be a de facto standard, but what makes MS an *unnecessary* evil is the fact that the de facto standard could have been far more like a digital work of art and far less like a digital turd.
Just to clarify the parent and grandparent, at Harvard Commencements, the speaker will receive his honorary degree at the main ceremony, but his/her address will take place later on at a separate afternoon event where attendance often reflects the popularity of the speaker. The main ceremony is always packed to the limit because that is where the various graduates (BA, MA, PhD, MD, JD, etc.) process in their robes, etc. These then retreat to various venues (undergrads to their Harvard houses, MAa and PhDs to Sanders Theater last I checked, JDs to the Law School, etc) for lunch and to receive their actual diplomas. The commencement speaker speaks after all this and his/her address is often poorly attended. I imagine Gates' address will be well attended simply because of the national/international interest it will inevitably raise.
Programming "whiz" [sic] is right - like cheese whiz. It was Paul Allen who was the wizard programmer, not Gates, who was always the businessman. Of course they wanted the colloquial abbreviation "wiz."
Hans Boehm thinks that it is not only difficult, it is impossible. In fact, he has a paper showing why.
The bottom line is that those who think it is easy or straightforward have been unwittingly creating non-deterministic programs that do unexpected things at seemingly random intervals. These non-deterministic things are usually written off as random crashes, but they are due to the fact that threading cannot be implemented at the library level - it must be built into the language standard and compiler to work correctly.
I agree with much of your comment, but please realize that Erlang was designed for, and is now used in soft real time telecom switches. When the number of processes becomes very high (in the thousands) erlang performance does not degrade unlike threaded systems which often do when the number of threads get this high. So erlang does focus on performance, just a very specific kind of performance - scalability to thousands of processes.
If the FDA wasn't there, private enterprise would come up with a certification system for drugs as well, and it would likely work better than the FDA does.
Indeed, the FDA could be effectively eliminated if the US government simply mandated that all drug manufacturers were required to carry a certain amount of tort insurance for each product they sell. Just as in the case of fire insurance and UL, the insurance companies would demand some sort of independent certification a-la UL for any drug they underwrite. You'd have a very reliable, prompt, and cost effective certification system in short order because insurance companies are very concerned about collecting premiums - leading to prompt certification because there are no premiums to collect till the drug is certified - and not making payments on claims - leading to reliable certification because any improperly certified drug is a tort claim that the insurer must pay. Costs would be kept down since no drug company would undertake certification if it were prohibitively expensive.
By contrast federal employees don't see income reductions if they fail to spend tax dollars effectively.
1. Cancel Office for the Mac and cease support and updates for exisiting versions
Apple has thought of this. That's why Apple is in the middle of developing an Office replacement. Pages, Keynote, and the soon be released excel compatible spreadsheet app.
2. Buy Adobe 3. Cancel all Adobe products for the Mac and cease support and updates for existing versions
This merger/aquisition would never be approved since MS is already a convicted monopolist. Even if approved, Apple has Aperture (high end) and iPhoto (low end) ready for precisely this contingency.
4. Buy DigiDesign 5. Cancel ProTools for the Mac and cease support and updates for existing versions
Even if this one were approved, Apple already has Logic Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Garage Band , for this market.
Apple has thought of your "5 step plan" and have been taking steps to counter it for years.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple iPhone (and, in fact, pretty much ever cell phone in the world) is manufactured in China...
...to US standards and regulations, according to a design and specifications provided by engineers working for a US company.
Knock-offs only have to look similar - they do not have to meet US safety and other standards and regulations.
One possible oversight in his evidence is that it is based on wills. Did medieval peasant poor do much in the way of will writing? Not having a pot to piss in, there would be far less need, incentive, or means to have one prepared. On the other hand, people of means had both the reason and the means to prepare wills. So we should expect that large, wealthy families would be over-represented in the available historical documents, and large, piss-poor families without any wills would be systematically underrepresented in the available evidence.
Has he even attempted to correct for this possible bias, or is he just running with the raw uncorrected sample I wonder?
His grasping at genetics suggests a blithe disregard for basic scientific methodology like Occam's Razor (not to mention that it smacks of social darwinism - the idea that the rich are rich because they're genetically superior to the poor, so the poor should be allowed to die off as part of natural selection). He thinks that there are genes for capitalist behavior more prevalent among the wealthy than the poor? As another poster suggested, if this were true then wealth based polygamous societies would have spawned the industrial revolution long before the 19th century. After all, the wealthy in those societies have been out reproducing the poor for hundreds if not thousands of years because rich men can buy multiple wives and have 50 or more children.
The simpler and therefore preferred explanation is that:
1. People with wealth behave differently than people without wealth because the wealthy have many more resources at their disposal, not because they are genetically superior in some unspecified sense.
2. The rich didn't out reproduce the poor uniquely in England (he notes that the opposite is true in historical records from Japan). Rather, the poor out reproduced the rich just as in Asia, but his data are just systematically biased because desperately poor illiterate people with 11 kids don't pay lawyers to make up a useless will to ensure that their sole possessions, the clothes they died in, are fairly divided among their heirs.
Hate to say it, but maybe the Janjaweed have a point in Darfur....
You are aware that they're engaged in a campaign of systematic rape and murder along racial lines right? So the "point" that they have is what, mass rape? race war? genocide?
Nobody drank water before the introduction of coffee and tea in Europe. They drank Ale, and lots of it. The alcohol content was an effective anti-microbial that made the otherwise pestilential water safe to drink.
So the transition was not from water to tea and coffee, but from several quarts of ale a day (including children) to a pint or two or ale and pint or two of tea or coffee. Europe became much more alert not just because of the introduction of caffeine, but because of the concomitant reduction in alcohol consumption.
Sadly such christians are the majority - for example roman catholics are required to believe literally in the resurrection and ascension of jesus or they are not catholics in good standing. That's a billion christians right there.
I'm sure Steve Jobs will cry himself to sleep tonight because of your incisive critique.
If you reload the same software and it happens again and again, guess what? You're an idiot and at some point you stop receiving support for that problem.
Not until you've already wasted the provider's time and money with at least two service visits/phone swaps. Pretty sure AT&T and Apple would like to avoid this.
The iPhone is an upmarket device. You missed the key scenario:
Company allows employees/partners to purchase their own smart phones and use them for work - heck, the company will even pay the monthly bill - as long as these devices do email and allow you read, edit, and email word docs - via Google Apps on the iPhone. Well heeled employees/partners buy an iPhone both to do work and as a way cool status symbol - "`What's that on your phone Rick?' `Oh, I'm just watching SpiderMan 3'"
Very few companies are going to buy all their employees an iPhone, but this downmarket, low cost IT niche is not what Apple is targeting with the device in its first release. Apple has always targeted the taste makers of the high end of the market in order to build mindshare. Then they sell the scaled down less expensive version to the mass market a year or two later. cf. the iPod -> shuffle.
How and why the towers collapsed is well understood and has nothing to do with conspiracy theories.
Polar bears are strong swimmers, but they can't swim indefinitely - they need ice floes to haul out on, rest and hunt. With greater ice melting, there's more open ocean, and a greater chance that ice bears will be unable to find ice before tiring and drowning.
Like it or not, politics is where the rubber meets the road. If there is going to be any action to change human behavior, it is certainly not going to come from scientists themselves even though they do the actual science. Any significant change in behavior is going to come from policy makers creating regulations based on what the majority of scientists tell them.
Look at the reduction in atmospheric pollution in the US at the end of the last century. It was almost entirely due to the standards introduced by the Clean Air Act. Scientists provided the research showing that industrial activities, automobiles, etc, where lowering air quality in many areas. However, it took politicians to take this science and enforce behavioral changes among people. Scientists do science but they don't create policy - politicians do.
Now, look at climate change. The GGGP said (adding comic flair) "[Those GW nuts think the planet's getting warmer. But look at Canada -- it's just the opposite.]" [1]
you can't say, "That's just anecdotal. If you look at the set of ALL industrialized terran planets in which greedy capitalists mercilessly dump CO2 into the atmosphere, they're hot as hell.[2]"
but you can say "that's just one location on a very large planet, and climate models do in fact predict that some regions will get colder but the global *mean* temperature will rise."
Ice melting = sea level rising = coastal flooding
Most human beings live near the coast = big problem
oops, should be "Please fondle my bum."
Please fondle my buttocks
If they stopped playing IBM's old closed architecture game, and leveraged the manufacturing power of the near east by allowing vendors like HP, Dell, Toshiba, and Sony build machines that run OS X; maybe we could have a duopoly in the Operating System market.
This is raised time and again as if it would somehow magically be profitable for Apple to hand generic pc manufacturers all the markup that Apple now keeps on hardware running Mac OS X. Apple could charge manufacturers no more than $50.00 a box for an OS X license - probably significantly less - because they would be in direct competition with MS, and that's what MS charges. Apple's profit on even mid range Macs is much higher than this - a couple of hundred. Apple would have to instantly start selling 4 to 10 times as many OS X systems just to maintain parity with their current profits.
For all the people speculating on what Apple should do - consider the distinct possibility that they've already considered your idea and run the actual numbers, and that's why they aren't doing it!
Speaking of fads (don't know if you're really serious about the iPod being a fad btw) does anyone really think that Ajax is the real future of computing as Graham claims? Maybe his little Web 2.0 startup bubble is causing some hyperbolic groupthink. In the article he provides a link to an Ajax photo editing "replacement" for Photoshop. Have you tried this thing? It is incredibly slow - I'm on a broadband connection that routinely does 1MB/sec downstream - and that slowness was just the half assed basic stuff it does, which in no way compares to real professional photo editing.
Ajax may take over the grandma space - truly basic things like email and very simple document editing - but once we get past the level of tasks that computers on professional's desks did 20 years ago, people are going to want desktops. Don't get me started on gaming, the traditional driver of increased desktop horsepower - does anyone seriously think that Ajax is going to eat game software houses' lunch?
The desktop software market is just going to move to the high end - which is the most profitable part of the market, leaving Web 2.0 to be the shareware (or adware) of the new millenium.
Common misconception - the actual marginal cost of each additional sale is its *support* component not the cost of copying. Each additional copy costs the manufacturer next to nothing only if the software manufacturer provides no support with each new sale.
If, as you admit, Apple was able to do this before Microsoft, then Microsoft cannot be, as you claim a *necessary* evil. It may be necessary for there to be a de facto standard, but what makes MS an *unnecessary* evil is the fact that the de facto standard could have been far more like a digital work of art and far less like a digital turd.
Just to clarify the parent and grandparent, at Harvard Commencements, the speaker will receive his honorary degree at the main ceremony, but his/her address will take place later on at a separate afternoon event where attendance often reflects the popularity of the speaker. The main ceremony is always packed to the limit because that is where the various graduates (BA, MA, PhD, MD, JD, etc.) process in their robes, etc. These then retreat to various venues (undergrads to their Harvard houses, MAa and PhDs to Sanders Theater last I checked, JDs to the Law School, etc) for lunch and to receive their actual diplomas. The commencement speaker speaks after all this and his/her address is often poorly attended. I imagine Gates' address will be well attended simply because of the national/international interest it will inevitably raise.
Programming "whiz" [sic] is right - like cheese whiz. It was Paul Allen who was the wizard programmer, not Gates, who was always the businessman. Of course they wanted the colloquial abbreviation "wiz."
Hans Boehm thinks that it is not only difficult, it is impossible. In fact, he has a paper showing why.
The bottom line is that those who think it is easy or straightforward have been unwittingly creating non-deterministic programs that do unexpected things at seemingly random intervals. These non-deterministic things are usually written off as random crashes, but they are due to the fact that threading cannot be implemented at the library level - it must be built into the language standard and compiler to work correctly.
I agree with much of your comment, but please realize that Erlang was designed for, and is now used in soft real time telecom switches. When the number of processes becomes very high (in the thousands) erlang performance does not degrade unlike threaded systems which often do when the number of threads get this high. So erlang does focus on performance, just a very specific kind of performance - scalability to thousands of processes.
If the FDA wasn't there, private enterprise would come up with a certification system for drugs as well, and it would likely work better than the FDA does.
Indeed, the FDA could be effectively eliminated if the US government simply mandated that all drug manufacturers were required to carry a certain amount of tort insurance for each product they sell. Just as in the case of fire insurance and UL, the insurance companies would demand some sort of independent certification a-la UL for any drug they underwrite. You'd have a very reliable, prompt, and cost effective certification system in short order because insurance companies are very concerned about collecting premiums - leading to prompt certification because there are no premiums to collect till the drug is certified - and not making payments on claims - leading to reliable certification because any improperly certified drug is a tort claim that the insurer must pay. Costs would be kept down since no drug company would undertake certification if it were prohibitively expensive.
By contrast federal employees don't see income reductions if they fail to spend tax dollars effectively.
1. Cancel Office for the Mac and cease support and updates for exisiting versions
Apple has thought of this. That's why Apple is in the middle of developing an Office replacement. Pages, Keynote, and the soon be released excel compatible spreadsheet app.
2. Buy Adobe
3. Cancel all Adobe products for the Mac and cease support and updates for existing versions
This merger/aquisition would never be approved since MS is already a convicted monopolist. Even if approved, Apple has Aperture (high end) and iPhoto (low end) ready for precisely this contingency.
4. Buy DigiDesign
5. Cancel ProTools for the Mac and cease support and updates for existing versions
Even if this one were approved, Apple already has Logic Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Garage Band , for this market.
Apple has thought of your "5 step plan" and have been taking steps to counter it for years.