The mechanical approach was still a dead end that was not on the path to anything like where we are today. He was like the guys, previous to the Wright Brothers, who spent their (short) lives working on flapping wings. You could argue they had the right idea - heaver-than-air powered flight - and thus inspired those who came after - but the fact remains, they were barking up the wrong tree.
I think people are overvaluing the idea of "computation" in the abstract, rather than the implementation of actual machines to do it quickly, reliably, and cheaply. The ones that finally did so didn't owe much to Babbage. The idea of doing calculations faster has always been there, and once there were practical machines to do so, there was no delay waiting for a conceptual leap in how to exploit and generalize them.
The study says that the system gives the vast majority of profits to US business (Apple, iPhone carriers, and a little to other US ecosystem members)
Actually it doesn't! Here is what it (the study, not the Forbes story) does say:
After Apple, the next biggest beneficiaries in the iPad and iPhone supply chains are Korean
companies such as LG and Samsung, who provide the display and memory chips, and whose
gross profits account for 5% and 7%, respectively, of the sales price for the iPhone and iPad.
So, second to Apple is Korea, i.e. manufacturing. Plus, big swaths of the pie charts are "materials." What does that mean, if not costs for manufactured goods (even if it's bulk stuff like cardboard boxes)?
Anyways I don't understand what these charts are showing, since there is no slice for Apple's own development costs - i.e., no R&D!
Even if you're 100% right, the author of the Forbes article would have no grounds to disagree with you. He'd simply interpret that as proof that branding is the creator of "real" value, whereas design and engineering can be lumped in with manufacturing, as work for dopes who really don't deserve even what little they get for their meager contribution to the pie chart.
Using Bitcoins as an investment is a lot like gambling. However...
I can assure you that as a *currency* Bitcoin is wonderful.
In other words, you agree with the article that Bitcoin is useful as a money transfer service but not as a reserve currency. If it's easy to exchange but its value fluctuates a lot, the only reasonable use is to buy bitcoins with dollars and send them to somebody who immediately converts them back. In other words, to transfer funds.
But even that could be revolutionary. I'm one of those people who still hopes micropayments will become commponplace on the web. Right now the "currency" of exchange on the web is ad placement. Money flows into the system to buy ads, and flows out as people who've seen the ads buy real-world products. But that's an awfully lame "currency."
I wouldn't mind charging people a penny to send me an email. If they don't care 1 penny's worth, then I don't want it. And since the number of messages I send is on the same order as what I receive (since I'm not a spammer), it would roughly break even anyways.
I agree with you on the problems, but maybe this budding industry will help standardize practices and metrics and make the IT industry more mature by quantifying risks as dollars so companies can understand them.
And it got that way because we continue to vote (long-term average) to make it that way. For example, Bush was a 2-term president, and he appointed the activist judges who chose to rule broadly in favor of corporate influence of elections in the Citizens United case. John McCain ran on Campaign Finance Reform in 2000. He lost to Bush.
Don't say that plutocracy is alien to our culture. We were one of the last nations to abolish slavery. We have weak labor laws and no meaningful unions. We abhor the "death tax." We vote against campaign finance restrictions. We have always been a libertarian-leaning nation, which in practice means allowing wealth and power to consolidate.
Americans could have put a stop to it by voting against it, period. That's all they had to do. So whether they assented actively or passively is a very slight difference.
Bad analogy. Congressmen aren't self-selected (like terrorists are), they are elected, so they actually DO represent mainstream American sentiment. (Just like how the whole don't-blame-American-citizens-for-Iraq argument stopped making sense after Bush won re-election.)
And the farms/companies that produce these crops have a right not to have to pay to indulge people's irrational fears.
Meh, you can twist anything to be an unfair imposition on somebody if you try hard enough. Disclosure isn't much of an imposition, so the threshold for requiring it should be low.
OK, I exaggerated. But it's all too easy to imagine in retrospect that Park Xerox had this great futuristic computer that could have been marketed, but that is far from the truth. There was never a lack of ideas on how to use processing power at the time to make things nicer for the user, but affordable hardware wasn't good enough yet, and the Alto was not built on marketable hardware.
Better yet, what if Apple had come out with the i7 Macbook Pro in 1977 instead of that crummy Apple II? If they had priced it right, and thrown in 512 GB SSD drive and 8 GB RAM, I think they could have got a lot of traction in the marketplace. If only they hadn't been so clueless!
Meanwhile, my kid's school can't afford to hire enough teacher for every class.
The whole point of this thing is to save money. It costs about $1M / year to keep one soldier in a combat theater. Whether those savings are used back home or for more adventures abroad depends on who gets voted into office.
The Mexico/US border doesn't move a lot. I don't understand why UAV surveillance of it is increasing, while the Boeing system of fixed cameras failed after a $1e9 investment. It seems like fixed cameras would be much cheaper than keeping planes in the air, and would create fewer privacy concerns.
Who is going to run current desktop software/OS on a mobile device that has a drastically different spec in other areas (memory, screen size, touchscreen, etc.)?
Smartphones and tablets are currently adjacent to (rather than replacing) PCs. But if I could have one tiny portable computer for everything and just plug it into larger peripherals for heavy-duty work, I would.
That's a bit of a cheap shot. Increased component integration has been a driving force for longer than Intel has been a company, and Intel has been as much of a driving force as anybody else. In fact Intel should excel at system-on-a-chip, since it's all about getting lots of transistors on a small piece of silicon, something they happen to be pretty good at.
Another possible cause was the overly difficult emergency pull. Again, not exactly hi-tech. These kinds of design problems are often attributable to poor management in the design phase, rushed development, or sweeping known problems under the rug because of budgetary concerns.
I would be very surprised if the 40 lb pull was designed that way without any thought. These emergency actions (ejection seats being the obvious example) are a difficult tradeoff between quick emergency access, vs. preventing accidental activation which can be dangerous in itself. As another example, states have laws regarding the minimum trigger pull (in pounds) for handguns, and for police handguns in particular, and there is endless debate about what it should be.
The problem with hypoxia is that it makes you stupid, and you may not feel it creeping up on you. Efforts are underway to train pilots to recognize the effects so they can take corrective action.
I guess I don't see your point, since I have never met (or even read about) a robot-car revolutionary - i.e. somebody who thinks the technology is ready for primetime and there should be a sudden conversion to it, or that human pilots should now be removed from passenger-carrying airlines. Nobody thinks that. The technology will progress incrementally, just as it always has. Traction control, for example, seems to have gained widespread acceptance and is no longer considered futuristic, even though what it actually does is quite complex and practically none of the people who use it could explain the algorithms involved.
But the best part is that once you fix a bug in an automated system, it's fixed forever, whereas a fresh new crop of novices hits the roads/skies every day.
There were people against airbags, too, because they killed some people who otherwise wouldn't have died. You work on fixing those things. But whether the system as a whole is worthwhile is judged on whether it saves more than it kills.
Slashdot Mirror
I think people are overvaluing the idea of "computation" in the abstract, rather than the implementation of actual machines to do it quickly, reliably, and cheaply. The ones that finally did so didn't owe much to Babbage. The idea of doing calculations faster has always been there, and once there were practical machines to do so, there was no delay waiting for a conceptual leap in how to exploit and generalize them.
Does the same go for open-source developers who write software to do the same thing and put it up on sourceforge or kernel.org?
Actually it doesn't! Here is what it (the study, not the Forbes story) does say:
So, second to Apple is Korea, i.e. manufacturing. Plus, big swaths of the pie charts are "materials." What does that mean, if not costs for manufactured goods (even if it's bulk stuff like cardboard boxes)?
Anyways I don't understand what these charts are showing, since there is no slice for Apple's own development costs - i.e., no R&D!
Even if you're 100% right, the author of the Forbes article would have no grounds to disagree with you. He'd simply interpret that as proof that branding is the creator of "real" value, whereas design and engineering can be lumped in with manufacturing, as work for dopes who really don't deserve even what little they get for their meager contribution to the pie chart.
In other words, you agree with the article that Bitcoin is useful as a money transfer service but not as a reserve currency. If it's easy to exchange but its value fluctuates a lot, the only reasonable use is to buy bitcoins with dollars and send them to somebody who immediately converts them back. In other words, to transfer funds.
But even that could be revolutionary. I'm one of those people who still hopes micropayments will become commponplace on the web. Right now the "currency" of exchange on the web is ad placement. Money flows into the system to buy ads, and flows out as people who've seen the ads buy real-world products. But that's an awfully lame "currency."
I wouldn't mind charging people a penny to send me an email. If they don't care 1 penny's worth, then I don't want it. And since the number of messages I send is on the same order as what I receive (since I'm not a spammer), it would roughly break even anyways.
I agree with you on the problems, but maybe this budding industry will help standardize practices and metrics and make the IT industry more mature by quantifying risks as dollars so companies can understand them.
The problem they defined is that wealth in the US is concentrating into too few hands.
Next!
Don't say that plutocracy is alien to our culture. We were one of the last nations to abolish slavery. We have weak labor laws and no meaningful unions. We abhor the "death tax." We vote against campaign finance restrictions. We have always been a libertarian-leaning nation, which in practice means allowing wealth and power to consolidate.
Americans could have put a stop to it by voting against it, period. That's all they had to do. So whether they assented actively or passively is a very slight difference.
Bad analogy. Congressmen aren't self-selected (like terrorists are), they are elected, so they actually DO represent mainstream American sentiment. (Just like how the whole don't-blame-American-citizens-for-Iraq argument stopped making sense after Bush won re-election.)
$475 ipad cases, of course.
Meh, you can twist anything to be an unfair imposition on somebody if you try hard enough. Disclosure isn't much of an imposition, so the threshold for requiring it should be low.
What the graph title means by "2000 Constant $" is that the figures are adjusted for inflation.
Actually NASA's funding has been very stable for the last 40 years.
OK, I exaggerated. But it's all too easy to imagine in retrospect that Park Xerox had this great futuristic computer that could have been marketed, but that is far from the truth. There was never a lack of ideas on how to use processing power at the time to make things nicer for the user, but affordable hardware wasn't good enough yet, and the Alto was not built on marketable hardware.
Better yet, what if Apple had come out with the i7 Macbook Pro in 1977 instead of that crummy Apple II? If they had priced it right, and thrown in 512 GB SSD drive and 8 GB RAM, I think they could have got a lot of traction in the marketplace. If only they hadn't been so clueless!
The whole point of this thing is to save money. It costs about $1M / year to keep one soldier in a combat theater. Whether those savings are used back home or for more adventures abroad depends on who gets voted into office.
I suppose bias against Chinese-originated patents could stifle this... but I suppose they will just create shell companies to work around that.
The Mexico/US border doesn't move a lot. I don't understand why UAV surveillance of it is increasing, while the Boeing system of fixed cameras failed after a $1e9 investment. It seems like fixed cameras would be much cheaper than keeping planes in the air, and would create fewer privacy concerns.
Smartphones and tablets are currently adjacent to (rather than replacing) PCs. But if I could have one tiny portable computer for everything and just plug it into larger peripherals for heavy-duty work, I would.
That's a bit of a cheap shot. Increased component integration has been a driving force for longer than Intel has been a company, and Intel has been as much of a driving force as anybody else. In fact Intel should excel at system-on-a-chip, since it's all about getting lots of transistors on a small piece of silicon, something they happen to be pretty good at.
Hits are irrelevant unless they contain the information in question. Nobody is trying to suppress the fact that the virus exists.
I would be very surprised if the 40 lb pull was designed that way without any thought. These emergency actions (ejection seats being the obvious example) are a difficult tradeoff between quick emergency access, vs. preventing accidental activation which can be dangerous in itself. As another example, states have laws regarding the minimum trigger pull (in pounds) for handguns, and for police handguns in particular, and there is endless debate about what it should be.
The problem with hypoxia is that it makes you stupid, and you may not feel it creeping up on you. Efforts are underway to train pilots to recognize the effects so they can take corrective action.
I guess I don't see your point, since I have never met (or even read about) a robot-car revolutionary - i.e. somebody who thinks the technology is ready for primetime and there should be a sudden conversion to it, or that human pilots should now be removed from passenger-carrying airlines. Nobody thinks that. The technology will progress incrementally, just as it always has. Traction control, for example, seems to have gained widespread acceptance and is no longer considered futuristic, even though what it actually does is quite complex and practically none of the people who use it could explain the algorithms involved.
There were people against airbags, too, because they killed some people who otherwise wouldn't have died. You work on fixing those things. But whether the system as a whole is worthwhile is judged on whether it saves more than it kills.