Modern life has reached an annoying level of materialism. Lately I've been thinking about how each possession requires time and effort to own (to maintain and repair it, supply fuel/electricity for it, shop for a replacement when it wears out, etc). In fact I've reached the point where I literally don't have time to own anything else, unless I start paying others to maintain it. It's too much.
And yet... I have stuff that I really like. I've devoted a lot of time to crafting a PVR from scratch, and having it loaded with thousands of mp3's and hooked up to a nice stereo is something I really enjoy. I have a couple motorcycles that I enjoy riding, planning and taking trips on, and repairing (usually). I have a house. I have a fully stocked tool chest (that I use to fix everything else) that's taken years of gradual additions to accrue.
So the idea of discarding all the "stuff" is and starting fresh is enticing... yet I couldn't do it. Guess I'm "owned."
Science and technology rarely progress along the path predicted by sci-fi writers - or even researchers in the field. I don't think we really want to re-invent people anyways. What we want is machines to do lots of dirty work and tedious calculation and not complain. But finally, it must be noted that it's not over yet! 100 years from now AI may be very, very different from today.
The other really dumb thing about the studies I've looked at is they don't consider the value of the interruption at all, only looking at the detrimental impact on the "primary" task. Responding to emails will obviously slow you down in finishing that report, but you will also stay on top of whatever issues were raised by the email - which in reality may very well be more important than the report. Even the dangers of cellphone driving have to be weighed against the value of the time saved. If safety were all that mattered we would all walk instead of driving.
Name a reason for the Iraq war that is not full of the same logical inconsistencies, especially if you take the outcome into account.
Without oil, the US and the middle east would have little to do with each other in the first place. And without oil wealth, radical Islam wouldn't have any resources to support international terrorism even if they still wanted to.
No, I'm not really saying we're as far-gone as imperial Japan, but the invasion of Iraq was simply not justified.
The big problem with the WWII analogy is that we are now the other side. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they needed oil. The difference is they were trying to break up the oil embargo we imposed on them, whereas Iraq was not imposing an oil embargo on us. And obviously Japan didn't invade Texas and take the oil to "repay" Japan for the cost of the invasion. So, yeah, the problem is political. You can't win when there are is no reason to be there and no criteria for victory, and your losses are already more than you could possibly gain.
Not only could it have happened another way, it absolutely would have. "Without the massive adoption of Windows and the ease of use it introduced as opposed to character-based environments, companies like Intel would have had little incentive to sink the billions they did in R&D... Not much money to be made on platforms that are not selling." What is this? IBM couldn't make DOS PCs fast enough, they were selling like hotcakes. Then the clone makers came in and even more were selling. OS/2 would definitely have happened without Windows, since the idea of the GUI was already firmly established, and Windows technology didn't catch up to OS/2 for almost 10 years - and OS/2 would have come to fruition a lot faster if IBM hadn't partnered with Microsoft who (of course) sucker-punched them and turned into a competitor. Still, even without Microsoft there were others who could have beat IBM to the punch. Many home users' first GUI PC was an Apple, Commodore (GEOS), Atari ST, or Amiga.
You can go by the date of a name change if you want, but either way the fact is Microsoft did not pioneer the GUI at all, and the quote you cited ("in reponse to the growing interest in GUIs") confirms that.
The first "real" PC I ever had was a souped-up Zeos Pantera 486 with 16MB of RAM, a Diamond Stealth64 sporting an amazing 4MB of VRAM, a SCSI card with a 105MB HDD on top and - get this - a gynormous 17-inch monitor. I paid close to $6K back then for that. Today I can put together something that is for all purposes a super computer compared to that, for about $600. The reason for that is and always has been Microsoft Windows.
Insanity! That's like giving Henry Ford all the credit for the industrial revolution. Moore's law was stated in 1965 when Bill Gates was 10 years old. The truth is, without Microsoft, PCs today would be a bit better or a bit worse, there's no way of knowing for sure. But they would still be here. And sitting here typing this on my Linux PC (running X which also pre-dates Windows by a longshot), posting on the Internet (where MS was a latecomer because Gates' competing vision was distributing Encarta on CD-ROM), I see little to be thankful to Microsoft.
It doesn't have to be that way. NASA certainly has shown that long term projects can have spectacular results.
Linux has shown that OS development doesn't have to be phased in huge long-term projects in the first place. The kernel changes continuously, often supporting both the current "best" way of doing something as well as the previous "deprecated" interface that will disappear after a few years.
Now, you could say "you can't leap a chasm two inches at a time," but where is the great leap forward with Vista?
"As you know, a U.S. element was nearly overrun four days ago and continued to call close air support and ensure that our forces did not suffer defeat. These two examples are typical of the performance of your soldiers and airmen, unquote.
Those men are living the dream. They're getting to do exactly what they signed up for on the ground, on horseback and working with local forces."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Nov 21, 2001.
It's true, the US is nowhere even close to giving up on what we call "growth." Who will pick the lettuce!? Who will prop up social security when we get old!? But I don't think the problem is specific to us or capitalism.
Here's my analogy explaining this apparent paradox: Amphibians are less "advanced" than mammals, but still live their lives as they always have, though they are now food for not only their traditional predators but mammals too....And pollution and loss of habitat, but through all that, they still live amphibian lives.
How do you know we're analogous to amphibians instead of dinosaurs?
To build a machine that is intelligent, we need to understand how our own intelligence works.
I don't think so, any more than we had to understand how birds flew to make airplanes, or how our muscles work to make an internal combustion engine. I don't know why so many people believe copying humans is the shortest path to AI.
Microsoft and google are huge rivals with huge bank accounts, so playing them off each other to compete over you seems like a good strategy. I'm not sure what "wanting" to be bought out by one company vs. another really means to a CEO. If courting google makes Microsoft jealous enough to overbid for Yahoo, I think Yahoo would accept.
"Auxiliary pump's broken, sir. Refrigeration. We're losing our ice!"
A shower of warm rain shivered down upon them. The captain jerked his head
right and left. "Can you see the trouble? Christ, don't stand there, we haven't
time!"
The men rushed; the captain bent in the warm rain, cursing, felt his hands
run over the cold machine, felt them burrow and search, and while he worked he
saw a future which was removed from them by the merest breath. He saw the skin
peel from the rocket beehive, men, thus revealed, running, running, mouths
shrieking, soundless. Space was a black mossed well where life drowned its roars
and terrors. Scream a big scream, but space snuffed it out before it was half up
your throat. Men scurried, ants in a flaming match-box; the ship was dripping
lava, gushing steam, nothing!
...It took all of four seconds for the huge hand to push the empty Cup to the
fire. So here we are again, today, on another trail, he thought, reaching for a
cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of different fire with which to run
back up cold space, lighting out way, and take to Earth a gift of fire that
might bum forever. Why? He knew the answer before the question. Because the
atoms we work with our hands, on Earth, are pitiful; the atomic bomb is pitiful
and small and our knowledge is pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows
what we want to know, and only the sun has the secret. And besides, it's fun,
it's a chance, it's a great thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running.
There is no reason, really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men
hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw. My God, we'll say, we did it! And
here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well
power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children
and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a
thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of
science and religion: Drink!
Looking at the blog entry, no mention is made of an apple announcement at all; this blogger infers it is fixed based on what he would expect to see. What better definition of "quietly fixed" do you want?
From a developer standpoint, this is a very bad thing apple did. Understanding what's going on and getting stuff to work is hard enough without zombified debugging tools that lie to you.
Light weight and safety are still in tension even with a big budget. Sure, you can use expensive technology to make a lightweight car safer than it would otherwise be, perhaps even safer than a heavier, lower-tech car. But a heavier car with more of the same high-tech safety gear would be safer still. Let's be honest for a moment. If you somehow knew you were going to have a head-on collision with a car whose parking brake came loose on a steep hill, would you rather take the hit in a) a light, high-tech car with a bunch of safety features, or b) the exact same car with a ton of pig-iron welded to the front?
I'd like for you to be right, but the reality of it is that people will always pay for what they think is important. In this case, the idea of an SUV is very important to a lot of people. The importance is, for most owners, a necessary expense.
I would go a step further... the expense is the purpose! The reason people wear expensive clothes and jewelry and flashy cars with spinner rims is simply to waste money, to prove that they can. SUVs or no, this type of person will always find a way to make sure you can tell they have money to spend (even if it's borrowed).
For the big dollars that surgeons pull down, they are after all performing mostly rote procedures for the most part. When you can replace a decade of training a person with a simple file copy to load software on to a robot, think of the savings that represents. Health care costs are a big drag on our standard of living in all other areas and it's only getting worse. Not to mention the millions who die around the world because they simply cannot afford the procedures. I'm by no means saying this technology is ready or that I'd be willing to go under the robo-knife at this point, but I'm sure glad they're working on it.
Don't think it will ever make enough money to be profitable. Obviously a pork barrel project!
"Ever" is a long time. Imagine DC without the Metro, what a nightmare. But where did it come from? When it was built, why wasn't it shot down by everybody thinking it's just too gosh darn hard and probably not worth it anyways? It seems we can't accomplish anything anymore, anything that would require new infrastructure is "impossible," so we sit here suffering and doing nothing about it.
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Modern life has reached an annoying level of materialism. Lately I've been thinking about how each possession requires time and effort to own (to maintain and repair it, supply fuel/electricity for it, shop for a replacement when it wears out, etc). In fact I've reached the point where I literally don't have time to own anything else, unless I start paying others to maintain it. It's too much.
And yet... I have stuff that I really like. I've devoted a lot of time to crafting a PVR from scratch, and having it loaded with thousands of mp3's and hooked up to a nice stereo is something I really enjoy. I have a couple motorcycles that I enjoy riding, planning and taking trips on, and repairing (usually). I have a house. I have a fully stocked tool chest (that I use to fix everything else) that's taken years of gradual additions to accrue.
So the idea of discarding all the "stuff" is and starting fresh is enticing... yet I couldn't do it. Guess I'm "owned."
Science and technology rarely progress along the path predicted by sci-fi writers - or even researchers in the field. I don't think we really want to re-invent people anyways. What we want is machines to do lots of dirty work and tedious calculation and not complain. But finally, it must be noted that it's not over yet! 100 years from now AI may be very, very different from today.
The other really dumb thing about the studies I've looked at is they don't consider the value of the interruption at all, only looking at the detrimental impact on the "primary" task. Responding to emails will obviously slow you down in finishing that report, but you will also stay on top of whatever issues were raised by the email - which in reality may very well be more important than the report. Even the dangers of cellphone driving have to be weighed against the value of the time saved. If safety were all that mattered we would all walk instead of driving.
Without oil, the US and the middle east would have little to do with each other in the first place. And without oil wealth, radical Islam wouldn't have any resources to support international terrorism even if they still wanted to.
No, I'm not really saying we're as far-gone as imperial Japan, but the invasion of Iraq was simply not justified.
The big problem with the WWII analogy is that we are now the other side. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they needed oil. The difference is they were trying to break up the oil embargo we imposed on them, whereas Iraq was not imposing an oil embargo on us. And obviously Japan didn't invade Texas and take the oil to "repay" Japan for the cost of the invasion. So, yeah, the problem is political. You can't win when there are is no reason to be there and no criteria for victory, and your losses are already more than you could possibly gain.
Not only could it have happened another way, it absolutely would have. "Without the massive adoption of Windows and the ease of use it introduced as opposed to character-based environments, companies like Intel would have had little incentive to sink the billions they did in R&D... Not much money to be made on platforms that are not selling." What is this? IBM couldn't make DOS PCs fast enough, they were selling like hotcakes. Then the clone makers came in and even more were selling. OS/2 would definitely have happened without Windows, since the idea of the GUI was already firmly established, and Windows technology didn't catch up to OS/2 for almost 10 years - and OS/2 would have come to fruition a lot faster if IBM hadn't partnered with Microsoft who (of course) sucker-punched them and turned into a competitor. Still, even without Microsoft there were others who could have beat IBM to the punch. Many home users' first GUI PC was an Apple, Commodore (GEOS), Atari ST, or Amiga.
You can go by the date of a name change if you want, but either way the fact is Microsoft did not pioneer the GUI at all, and the quote you cited ("in reponse to the growing interest in GUIs") confirms that.
Now, you could say "you can't leap a chasm two inches at a time," but where is the great leap forward with Vista?
Those men are living the dream. They're getting to do exactly what they signed up for on the ground, on horseback and working with local forces." - Donald Rumsfeld, Nov 21, 2001.
Here's the acid test for a cult of personality: will it survive the departure of its founder? My bet: Microsoft will, Apple very likely won't.
Maybe the don't hire from the same talent pool. I've heard google hires a lot of PhDs, so you would expect them to pay more for that.
It's true, the US is nowhere even close to giving up on what we call "growth." Who will pick the lettuce!? Who will prop up social security when we get old!? But I don't think the problem is specific to us or capitalism.
Microsoft and google are huge rivals with huge bank accounts, so playing them off each other to compete over you seems like a good strategy. I'm not sure what "wanting" to be bought out by one company vs. another really means to a CEO. If courting google makes Microsoft jealous enough to overbid for Yahoo, I think Yahoo would accept.
From a developer standpoint, this is a very bad thing apple did. Understanding what's going on and getting stuff to work is hard enough without zombified debugging tools that lie to you.
Still, I agree having different penalties is silly.
But instead of speed limits, perhaps we should have momentum limits. I.e. your maximum speed is divided by the mass of your vehicle.
Light weight and safety are still in tension even with a big budget. Sure, you can use expensive technology to make a lightweight car safer than it would otherwise be, perhaps even safer than a heavier, lower-tech car. But a heavier car with more of the same high-tech safety gear would be safer still. Let's be honest for a moment. If you somehow knew you were going to have a head-on collision with a car whose parking brake came loose on a steep hill, would you rather take the hit in a) a light, high-tech car with a bunch of safety features, or b) the exact same car with a ton of pig-iron welded to the front?
Anyways, it's kinda silly. Radiohead never seemed to object to getting radio play, which is just one track at a time.
For the big dollars that surgeons pull down, they are after all performing mostly rote procedures for the most part. When you can replace a decade of training a person with a simple file copy to load software on to a robot, think of the savings that represents. Health care costs are a big drag on our standard of living in all other areas and it's only getting worse. Not to mention the millions who die around the world because they simply cannot afford the procedures. I'm by no means saying this technology is ready or that I'd be willing to go under the robo-knife at this point, but I'm sure glad they're working on it.