The following is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison as you are talking about OS X and I'm talking about OS, er, 7 or 8 I think (well, technically it's an Apple-to-Apple comparison, but anyway):
When Apple licensed the OS last time, it nearly took the company under. A lot of people (obviously) thought it was a good idea and it did benefit the end user. We got cheaper top-end Macs from third parties. The kicker was that Apple made most of their money from the high-end hardware, and so this ostensibly beneficial result nearly took them to the wall. Ironically, putting the user first could have destroyed exactly what the user wanted.
An interesting example of the way capitalism functions. I think most people would agree it was positive, although if Apple had collapsed, MS might have been split up, which could have been better in the long term.
Good on you for raising this. My own perception of the problem you describe with assuming humans are not Turing machines was much more vague; it mostly relied on my own feeling that, despite having read Goedel's theorems and learnt some of the methods of formal logic, I didn't really know it to be the case. As with your initial disclaimer, I think one tends to assume more intelligent people than you really have a grasp of it beyond yours.
Oddly enough, this returns to another poster's assertion that they had had a higher experience of consciousness than someone else; whether from a religious person or a mathematician, such statements must be treated carefully. This further returns to an earlier discussion about the place of philosophy in these discussions. I try not to believe anything in an absolute sense beyond the assertion, provable only to myself, that something exists. I can't prove it's 'me' ('I' might just think I'm me), but I am convinced that for any perception of anything to occur, something must exist.
Science, I think, needs only one assumption beyond this to be useful, which is that the world you observe has a consistent set of rules that will not change arbitrarily. Note, it doesn't assume the whole thing isn't an hallucination of some sort - it makes no comment on this - it simply tries to determine the rules of what is observed, with the assumption that they will not arbitrarily alter.
I think a lot of discussions on Slashdot conflate these quite different areas of thought, and the types of proof each one entails, and the domains in which such proof claims to operate.
You can already do this with OpenBSD's secure shell. KDE, Gnome and others have already taken advantage of this so it's GUI level already. Video is nice, but the information that's most important to people is tiny. In a free computing world, you will be able to securely share this information with others.
I am aware that you can do this (set up several boxes to work in this manner at a small company I started). My point was more that there isn't yet a) a simple mobile graphical terminal that is only designed to work in this manner, and thus does it really well, and b) there isn't yet a network high-bandwidth/coverage enough to allow me to do all the (often graphics/video intensive) things I do on my MacBook Pro on the road, in a wide range of places, without lots of on-board processing power.
As for freedoms, I don't have a problem with companies providing any of the software or hardware for any of the components in this system, but of course I'd like to see generic interconnects used rather than new proprietary systems.
Not sure you should be modded troll, there is certainly some value in what you say. I think the move towards 'web-apps' will help people be more prepared to run things remotely; VNC, X-windows and suchlike offer more sophistication of this sort. The web apps are important for getting the non-tecchies comfortable with the paradigm.
I would like to see a situation where all my data is held on a server. Maybe this can be one run by Google, maybe it can be one I run myself - I think the choice between pay-for and advert/lack-of-privacy subsidised is a good thing.
Data would be streamed where possible, mirrored where size/importance ratio makes it appropriate, cached where it's high bandwidth but the device doesn't have the requisite connection, etc. I then access all my stuff through any terminal device: laptop, phone, whatever.
I think the real watershed with this will be when a given device can access sufficient bandwidth to support full-resolution video. At that point, it all becomes very simple: you just stream the IO and as little as possible is done locally. Good implications for power and size here, but obviously it requires a hefty network.
I really like this possibility - we're honestly not that far from some of the functionality Ian M. Banks describes in his Culture novels. GPS + voice + internet + some clever software...
I think the GP meant the musicians are leaches, not the lottery winners. Unless he was talking about the lottery companies being a tax on the poor (based on statistics that show that it tends to be poorer folk who buy more tickets).
You make a lot of really good points, but the comment about government funding needing a measureable return is a tricky one. Some of the best returns on such speculative funding have been from tangential discoveries, or have greatly outstripped expectations due to some other unforseen development. Arguably, it's up to government to fund exactly the type of research that doesn't offer good returns (N.B. this is best done through universities IMO, not directly).
Having said that, your point about Babbage's flightiness is very much valid - by all means give (some) money to odd bits of research, but make sure the researcher is worth it. Funding someone to think should be as much about who's thinking as what they're thinking about.
True, true. A certain amount of hankering after elegance is just over-intellectualising.
I suppose I wish it were done in some entirely different manner, that ticked both boxes. For example, USB printers could include a small mass storage device which the computer looks for and contains drivers. Combine this with a consistent API for these drivers and any OS could plug-and-play with any USB printer, more like generic mass storage devices today.
OS X has this problem too (speaking as a Mac user here!). The standard install, which is of course not only the one most people will pick from the disc if they re-install but also the one pre-installed on machines, is huge. You can massively cut it down with a custom install that only includes the languages you're interested in (each translation is around 80MB and there are dozens), and gets rid of all the printer drivers (seriously, this is insane. I think many of the vendors include a separate utility programme for every model or something, the bulk of the install is printer crap, of which the GIMP drivers which are the most comprehensive are about 6MB!).
Well, yes, I agree with this. What I meant was, OS X retail costs a certain amount at the moment, because they know you'll have to buy their hardware (pace hackers), even if you buy the OS standalone. I meant that the standalone price would likely have to go up if hardware sales decreased. The true cost of the product would be revealed, and thus its true value when separated from the hardware. One has to be very careful discussing value and price in this sort of context, the two are not always equal. My contention is that this would not be good for Apple, as people do not realise the real extent of the value of the OS.
I absolutely admit that the hardware can be seen as subsidising the software, but I think people misunderstand the reality: it's not so much the users being forced to buy overpriced hardware by evil Apple, as the reality being that software simply cannot be supported at the sort of prices it generally demands, unless you are a monopoly. Seriously, show me a successful OS company that isn't either a monopoly or producing an embedded system or charging huge service agreements or using free software. I know I've caveated everyone away here, but that's exactly my point: selling an OS as a finished unit, end-of-story, without a favourable margin on a different (if related) product only works for one company.
When Apple did license the OS, it cut so much into their profits that the company nearly went under. So the fact that Mac users pay over-the-odds for hardware (which isn't entirely the case, it's more that there simply aren't commodity Macs in the same way as PCs, they're all heavily designed whether you like it or not) isn't Apple screwing them over but Apple existing the only way they could.
Note, I say 'could' here because the iPod has since generated a cash mountain for Apple. At this point they could use this to subsidise Mac prices. I for one am glad they don't. That sort of behaviour is what Sony or MS would do (PS3, XBOX), and is inherently monopolistic - using one of your markets to support another that is unprofitable. It leads to stagnation. I don't personally consider the OS/harware 'subsidy' in the same light because to me the marginal utility of each is greatly increased by their combination. I'm not paying a tax on hardware to support the OS, or a tax on the OS to support the hardware, I'm paying the extra value I get from them being produced in tandem. Arguably this extra value is having them exist at all, given what happened when Amelio was in charge.
Now, I quite appreciate that the marginal utility for different people is different. I'm not an Apple apologist (really!), I just have a different take on why they operate the way they do on the PC/OS side of things. I think it's dictated by market forces rather than some evil lock-in instinct. I think the same for Microsoft: they have to behave the way they do, it's their niche. The only way for consumers to alter this is to behave differently; some are by using Linux. However, the marginal utility of Linux is not large enough compared to the 'capital expenditure' of time for most users, so it hasn't exploded despite being free. I think it's fascinating that we have three such completely different models in the environment.
You're quite right, but it's a problem with the system, not with Apple. They make most of their money through hardware, and if they lost that then OS X would have to cost a lot more than Windows until it had a comparable market share. They only way to get that large a market share (and note, I don't think it would even be possible nowadays) is to employ the sort of borderline tactics Microsoft have used.
The size MS has to be to support an OS-only product is good evidence that the economics of the software industry aren't quite right. You can also see this from the fact that Linux even exists, and the endemic filesharing and priating that goes on. When any economic system is this far out of kilter with the real marginal value of its products, piracy is the result. William Pitt the younger knew it, why does no-one remember?!
I'd just like to throw in something I've said before on this site: why Apple couldn't crush Microsoft in the way you describe. It's the same reason Apple's 'market share' is better than it looks i.e. they have 6% of the OS market, and the consumer hardware market, and more than that it's 6% of the high-margin end of the hardware market (not to mention share in other markets such as mp3 players).
Apple tried licensing the OS before. What happened was that the other hardware manufacturers went after the highest-margin end of Apple's market (obviously), and it cut disproportionately into Apple's profits. They could only sell the cheap, slim-margin models successfully. It was a major factor in nearly killing the company in the 90s.
Like it or not (and personally, I've been very happy with all my five Macs), the Apple business model is integrated hardware and software. This is not so much to confer the simplicity of a limited set of hardware configurations (as you rightly point out, the situation is not that difficult to remedy) as it is a fundamental characteristic of the economics of the situation.
I think what annoys people is that they percieve a Mac as costing over-the-odds for hardware to support the OS (this is implied in your wanting the OS separately, no?). The evidence suggests that it's better to look at it as a combined product. Just as comparing Microsoft's market share to Apple's is inappropriate, suggesting that they tear what is actually a single product in two no matter how easy it is to do in a technical sense is ignoring the economic ties between the two.
Handwriting interpretation is certainly worth having as an option on any device which can handle it. I have a couple of reservations, though. First is that typical screen/touch resolutions do not, for me, do a satisfying enough job of detecting/showing handwriting. On my Wacom pad, there's enough resolution to detect small writing, but many touch-sensitive devices aren't quite up to it yet. The lower display resolution means you don't get as good visual feedback as with physical writing, and these two factors combine to make me feel clumsy. It probably is quicker than Dasher, it's just that I instinctively compare it to writing on paper, and I can't stop myself finding it annoying.
Having said that, I think that once high-resolution reflective (rather than emissive) screens are commonplace, it would be the system of choice.
My second reservation is based on usage. I like the idea of not having to bother with a stylus for an out-and-about device such as a phone. It's just one more thing to lose, and one more action to take before getting started (do any PDAs automatically unlock as the stylus is taken from it's slot? That would mitigate against my criticism).
I think we're going to see more and more input methods based on pre-computer techniques; the key ones are writing and speech, although hopefully some other haptic methods will become possible. I recall reading that a group of researchers had built physical simulations approaching the required speed for haptic feedback (the hand is much better than the eye at detecting a refresh rate - it has to be many hundreds of times a second to avoid feeling juddery). Despite this, there are times when unphysicality may be more useful, e.g. you only have one hand free (steady) and you don't want to talk outloud (maybe on a train, holding on?).
I don't know much about the OpenMoko architecture, but if there's a way to incorporate a new input method pervasively then it would certainly be worth a go, simply to assess whether it's workable on a mobile device. Dasher is open source - its creator David MacKay is greatly in favour of such things, and releases many (all?) of his academic works online.
I notice there's a tablet PC edition, anyone tried it?
This is a '2D' typing system i.e. workable with a mouse or equivalent - could well be quicker with fingers.
I got up to about 15 wpm with minimal practice. Apparently you can get 30 wpm with a bit more. I reckon it could also be tweaked if additional keys were available for certain very common words, and if the underlying probability model was trained to your personal habits.
More crazily, a phone or similar with acceleration detection could also incorporate whole-phone movements. So you might write a word with Dasher (or whatever), and then flick your wrist to the right for a space, left for a comma, away from you for a full stop, down for a carriage return, etc. Or you could make a system like Monkeyball on the Wii, where Dasher works with a pseudo-physical simulation of a ball on the screen, which you 'roll' to select letters and words (sorry, not very clearly explained if you've not used Dasher and played Monkeyball - an elite minority!).
I'm sure everything else you say is correct, but heating a glass of water with a 1.5V AA battery? You sure? I once put a 15cm long, 5mm diameter spring, probably 300 turns or so, across one of those bad-boys and it gave me a nasty burn really fast! I guess maybe it would have run down pretty quickly if I hadn't dropped it, though.
I've read an account of the development of early civilisations which stresses almost the opposite explanation. The mediterranean basin is an easier place to grow food (if not hunt/gather), leading to more sedentary leisure time, thus more pondering, thus more technological developments, thus even more leisure time and so on. Consider: the Egyptians relied on a uniquely ideal environment around the Nile.
An analogy could be made with Britain and the industrial revolution. Success was not driven by hardship and necessity, but by ideal environmental conditions (rivers and coastline) for developing manufacturing and naval industries.
It is possible that the initial impetus to move from hunter-gatherer to arable farmer was driven by greater need in cooler climes, but then again how would one survive long enough to work out how to farm if the envrionment didn't provide enough food to live at least several years? (I suppose simply storing autumnal wild foods might do, actually).
Anyway, I don't think the 'forced to be inventive' thing can be a complete explanation, as even if it were briefly true, the necessity of invention ended the moment agrarian society was established, and that was thousands of years ago at least.
Well, in this instance, at least one of the monkeys would immediately type the complete works of Shakepseare in their entirety. In fact, I reckon an infinite number of them might do it. Also, an infinite number of monkeys would come up with better versions of the complete works of Shakespeare and, sadly, an infinite number of worse versions of the complete novels of Jeffrey Archer.
Hear hear. Our desire as consumers should pretty much always be for more competition, with the caveat that someone needs to be around to apply pressure for interoperability. Sometimes the market takes care of this (e.g. cars have all ended up working roughly the same way, computer hardware tends to move from one standard to another with (annoying, but necessary) interim periods), and occasionally the government should step in (e.g. ensuring the basic postal services all co-operate), or some other body (e.g. W3C).
The number of cartels around annoys me. Personally, I think once a production/service/information industry has become an oligopoly it should be broken up. Conversely, I think pure infrastructure elements should be nationalised. Take the UK train system: it's all very well having train companies compete (not that they really do, but in theory), but track companies? I mean, it's not competition over how good the track is, it's competition over who can write the best application for tender and convince the government to give them the contract. What sort of qualification is that?
I believe the OLPC project is not aimed at countries/children who are starving. It is aimed at (rural?) communities that are largely self-sufficient, but lack the excess resources required to drastically improve their lot beyond its current level. In many of these places children already go to school. The idea is to reduce the cost of one of the most versatile resources humanity has created, and hopefully enable an acceleration of socio-economic development.
Some of these places may well be at risk from famine, but history has shown that simply rescuing countries from such disasters when they occur, while necessary and highly laudable, is insufficient in itself to help progress, and prevent their reoccurrence.
You're correct that there appear to be ways the money could be better spent, but bear in mind that another aim of the project is to have the machines built locally. This means two things: 1) there are wider economic benefits which will be driven by local needs (contrast this with the all-too-common misapplication of external aid); and 2) there isn't actually that much money behind this project, in the grand scheme of things--I think the staff is less than 20--so suggesting that the money is being misspent is something of a straw-man, even if unintentional.
It's possible the difference you're describing is not to do with the underlying 'guessing' algorithm, but the IO layer, i.e: if a first layer encoded the text according to thesaurus-style meaning groups (with a certain amount of context-sensitivity to account for homonyms), and then the algorithm produced a 'reply' guess based on this semantic encoding, and finally the first layer decoded (with random diction), you'd have an effect similar to the one you describe.
Admitedly, the grammatical interpretation process here is not trivial, but even Word does it to a certain extent (yes, I know it's famously bad at certain constructions, but one can at least see how they could be improved). Of course, it wouldn't quite do what you describe until the 'meaning units' are considerably longer than single words, and this would mean the first layer would have to be a good deal more sophisticated. However, that sort of pattern-grouping is another area in the same domain as compression algorithms (consider fractal compression), so it's not ridiculous to relate them to AI, even if you don't accept that the problems are a 1:1 match.
A criticism of what I've written above would be that the specific algorithm under discussion in TFA is unlikely to be as suitable for guessing these theoretical semantic units as plain text. This is true, however it doesn't negate the underlying point that some other algorithm built around another data model might display qualities necessary to pass the Turing test, one perhaps built around lessons learnt from this breakthrough.
Good point, and you've indirectly raised what I feel is the key issue here. Is there any difference between an idea that relates to the real world, and one which relates purely to a virtual world? Key points to consider might be: the distinction (if any) between a virtual world and its medium; the extent to which the real world can be treated as consisting entirely of information; and how do you value something with unrestricted supply?
There's a great book called Permutation City which, despite at least one logical flaw in its plot, is an excellent crowbar for one's mind on this topic. Well worth reading. It does address the question of needs of the real world vs needs of the simulation, and concludes in this case that the container will exercise control. Things that exist only in the simulation do have influence, because they control certain flows of information and intelligence, but as they become more sophisticated (including being intelligent), they necessarily become more self-referential and less relevant.
In this particular case, it becomes difficult for outsiders to relate the internal value to the simulation to value in the real world. One can guess that the claimant wouldn't be interested in virtual justice, because the value of the virtual world to him is in real-world money. Here we're back to the potentially thorny problem of how money (increasingly admitted to be a thing with purely informational existence, sometimes represented with physical objects, since countries began decoupling monetary value from comodities) relates to informational products. This is also tied up in some of the issues with media sharing going on at the moment.
Gosh, I have wittered on. Anyway, highly recommend Permutation City and a good economics textbook if you want some interesting insights on how the future of ICT might look.
A very sensible post. However, I think the GUI (or UI of another kind) always matters, and it would be better to say "if the GUI doesn't speed up or make easier the tasks you want to perform". One of the great things about OSX is flexibility, e.g.: you have a GUI that's efficient for slinging some files around and sorting them by hand, or you can whack open a terminal and batch-process a simple task, or you can get serious and write a script if you're going to be doing the same thing often enough to justify it.
Phone makers in general have not made sufficient intelligent effort to simply reduce the number of clicks required for most tasks, and Apple's success will, as you say, put pressure on in this area. The sad thing is that, with a bit more openness, Apple could have dealt a serious blow in the functionality arena as well (hardware constraints excepted).
The ray of hope is that the problems you outline with the iPhone, and the problems with phones in general, are almost entirely software issues. A bit more competition could work wonders.
Quite right. We have the capability nowadays to let artists cheaply promote and distribute their music online - far less than the cost of instruments and a recording studio. Calling the music companies parasites is a tricky one though. Someone will know better than me on this, but I suspect the total number of professional musicians has risen in line with the size of the recording industry. Now, this wasn't their aim, and I'm not holding them up as morally responsible, I'm just saying there are positive knock-on effects.
Now, it's clear the economics are breaking down (hence all the piracy), and thus the system does need shifting. Mergers have gradually led to a cartel, and prices cannot respond quickly enough to the immense downward pressure of technological advancement. Deflation of music prices is actually pretty high at the moment - average UK album prices have fallen from £11.25 in 2000 to £9.41 in 2007 (this is from retail research I'm doing at the moment) - but anyone can see that, based on the cost of creation and delivery, it should be much, much lower.
Ever use a piece of paper? I know tablet devices haven't properly taken off yet, but I reckon a good interface (think Nintendo DS - an 'interface' screen on the desk and a 'reference' screen where the monitor was) could seriously improve productivity. Throwing bits and pieces around in many applications would be so much quicker with two or more pointers, never mind all the more esoteric scrolling/pinching movements.
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The following is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison as you are talking about OS X and I'm talking about OS, er, 7 or 8 I think (well, technically it's an Apple-to-Apple comparison, but anyway):
When Apple licensed the OS last time, it nearly took the company under. A lot of people (obviously) thought it was a good idea and it did benefit the end user. We got cheaper top-end Macs from third parties. The kicker was that Apple made most of their money from the high-end hardware, and so this ostensibly beneficial result nearly took them to the wall. Ironically, putting the user first could have destroyed exactly what the user wanted.
An interesting example of the way capitalism functions. I think most people would agree it was positive, although if Apple had collapsed, MS might have been split up, which could have been better in the long term.
Good on you for raising this. My own perception of the problem you describe with assuming humans are not Turing machines was much more vague; it mostly relied on my own feeling that, despite having read Goedel's theorems and learnt some of the methods of formal logic, I didn't really know it to be the case. As with your initial disclaimer, I think one tends to assume more intelligent people than you really have a grasp of it beyond yours.
Oddly enough, this returns to another poster's assertion that they had had a higher experience of consciousness than someone else; whether from a religious person or a mathematician, such statements must be treated carefully. This further returns to an earlier discussion about the place of philosophy in these discussions. I try not to believe anything in an absolute sense beyond the assertion, provable only to myself, that something exists. I can't prove it's 'me' ('I' might just think I'm me), but I am convinced that for any perception of anything to occur, something must exist.
Science, I think, needs only one assumption beyond this to be useful, which is that the world you observe has a consistent set of rules that will not change arbitrarily. Note, it doesn't assume the whole thing isn't an hallucination of some sort - it makes no comment on this - it simply tries to determine the rules of what is observed, with the assumption that they will not arbitrarily alter.
I think a lot of discussions on Slashdot conflate these quite different areas of thought, and the types of proof each one entails, and the domains in which such proof claims to operate.
I am aware that you can do this (set up several boxes to work in this manner at a small company I started). My point was more that there isn't yet a) a simple mobile graphical terminal that is only designed to work in this manner, and thus does it really well, and b) there isn't yet a network high-bandwidth/coverage enough to allow me to do all the (often graphics/video intensive) things I do on my MacBook Pro on the road, in a wide range of places, without lots of on-board processing power.
As for freedoms, I don't have a problem with companies providing any of the software or hardware for any of the components in this system, but of course I'd like to see generic interconnects used rather than new proprietary systems.
Not sure you should be modded troll, there is certainly some value in what you say. I think the move towards 'web-apps' will help people be more prepared to run things remotely; VNC, X-windows and suchlike offer more sophistication of this sort. The web apps are important for getting the non-tecchies comfortable with the paradigm.
I would like to see a situation where all my data is held on a server. Maybe this can be one run by Google, maybe it can be one I run myself - I think the choice between pay-for and advert/lack-of-privacy subsidised is a good thing.
Data would be streamed where possible, mirrored where size/importance ratio makes it appropriate, cached where it's high bandwidth but the device doesn't have the requisite connection, etc. I then access all my stuff through any terminal device: laptop, phone, whatever.
I think the real watershed with this will be when a given device can access sufficient bandwidth to support full-resolution video. At that point, it all becomes very simple: you just stream the IO and as little as possible is done locally. Good implications for power and size here, but obviously it requires a hefty network.
I really like this possibility - we're honestly not that far from some of the functionality Ian M. Banks describes in his Culture novels. GPS + voice + internet + some clever software...
I think the GP meant the musicians are leaches, not the lottery winners. Unless he was talking about the lottery companies being a tax on the poor (based on statistics that show that it tends to be poorer folk who buy more tickets).
You make a lot of really good points, but the comment about government funding needing a measureable return is a tricky one. Some of the best returns on such speculative funding have been from tangential discoveries, or have greatly outstripped expectations due to some other unforseen development. Arguably, it's up to government to fund exactly the type of research that doesn't offer good returns (N.B. this is best done through universities IMO, not directly).
Having said that, your point about Babbage's flightiness is very much valid - by all means give (some) money to odd bits of research, but make sure the researcher is worth it. Funding someone to think should be as much about who's thinking as what they're thinking about.
True, true. A certain amount of hankering after elegance is just over-intellectualising.
I suppose I wish it were done in some entirely different manner, that ticked both boxes. For example, USB printers could include a small mass storage device which the computer looks for and contains drivers. Combine this with a consistent API for these drivers and any OS could plug-and-play with any USB printer, more like generic mass storage devices today.
OS X has this problem too (speaking as a Mac user here!). The standard install, which is of course not only the one most people will pick from the disc if they re-install but also the one pre-installed on machines, is huge. You can massively cut it down with a custom install that only includes the languages you're interested in (each translation is around 80MB and there are dozens), and gets rid of all the printer drivers (seriously, this is insane. I think many of the vendors include a separate utility programme for every model or something, the bulk of the install is printer crap, of which the GIMP drivers which are the most comprehensive are about 6MB!).
Well, yes, I agree with this. What I meant was, OS X retail costs a certain amount at the moment, because they know you'll have to buy their hardware (pace hackers), even if you buy the OS standalone. I meant that the standalone price would likely have to go up if hardware sales decreased. The true cost of the product would be revealed, and thus its true value when separated from the hardware. One has to be very careful discussing value and price in this sort of context, the two are not always equal. My contention is that this would not be good for Apple, as people do not realise the real extent of the value of the OS.
I absolutely admit that the hardware can be seen as subsidising the software, but I think people misunderstand the reality: it's not so much the users being forced to buy overpriced hardware by evil Apple, as the reality being that software simply cannot be supported at the sort of prices it generally demands, unless you are a monopoly. Seriously, show me a successful OS company that isn't either a monopoly or producing an embedded system or charging huge service agreements or using free software. I know I've caveated everyone away here, but that's exactly my point: selling an OS as a finished unit, end-of-story, without a favourable margin on a different (if related) product only works for one company.
When Apple did license the OS, it cut so much into their profits that the company nearly went under. So the fact that Mac users pay over-the-odds for hardware (which isn't entirely the case, it's more that there simply aren't commodity Macs in the same way as PCs, they're all heavily designed whether you like it or not) isn't Apple screwing them over but Apple existing the only way they could.
Note, I say 'could' here because the iPod has since generated a cash mountain for Apple. At this point they could use this to subsidise Mac prices. I for one am glad they don't. That sort of behaviour is what Sony or MS would do (PS3, XBOX), and is inherently monopolistic - using one of your markets to support another that is unprofitable. It leads to stagnation. I don't personally consider the OS/harware 'subsidy' in the same light because to me the marginal utility of each is greatly increased by their combination. I'm not paying a tax on hardware to support the OS, or a tax on the OS to support the hardware, I'm paying the extra value I get from them being produced in tandem. Arguably this extra value is having them exist at all, given what happened when Amelio was in charge.
Now, I quite appreciate that the marginal utility for different people is different. I'm not an Apple apologist (really!), I just have a different take on why they operate the way they do on the PC/OS side of things. I think it's dictated by market forces rather than some evil lock-in instinct. I think the same for Microsoft: they have to behave the way they do, it's their niche. The only way for consumers to alter this is to behave differently; some are by using Linux. However, the marginal utility of Linux is not large enough compared to the 'capital expenditure' of time for most users, so it hasn't exploded despite being free. I think it's fascinating that we have three such completely different models in the environment.
You're quite right, but it's a problem with the system, not with Apple. They make most of their money through hardware, and if they lost that then OS X would have to cost a lot more than Windows until it had a comparable market share. They only way to get that large a market share (and note, I don't think it would even be possible nowadays) is to employ the sort of borderline tactics Microsoft have used.
The size MS has to be to support an OS-only product is good evidence that the economics of the software industry aren't quite right. You can also see this from the fact that Linux even exists, and the endemic filesharing and priating that goes on. When any economic system is this far out of kilter with the real marginal value of its products, piracy is the result. William Pitt the younger knew it, why does no-one remember?!
I'd just like to throw in something I've said before on this site: why Apple couldn't crush Microsoft in the way you describe. It's the same reason Apple's 'market share' is better than it looks i.e. they have 6% of the OS market, and the consumer hardware market, and more than that it's 6% of the high-margin end of the hardware market (not to mention share in other markets such as mp3 players).
Apple tried licensing the OS before. What happened was that the other hardware manufacturers went after the highest-margin end of Apple's market (obviously), and it cut disproportionately into Apple's profits. They could only sell the cheap, slim-margin models successfully. It was a major factor in nearly killing the company in the 90s.
Like it or not (and personally, I've been very happy with all my five Macs), the Apple business model is integrated hardware and software. This is not so much to confer the simplicity of a limited set of hardware configurations (as you rightly point out, the situation is not that difficult to remedy) as it is a fundamental characteristic of the economics of the situation.
I think what annoys people is that they percieve a Mac as costing over-the-odds for hardware to support the OS (this is implied in your wanting the OS separately, no?). The evidence suggests that it's better to look at it as a combined product. Just as comparing Microsoft's market share to Apple's is inappropriate, suggesting that they tear what is actually a single product in two no matter how easy it is to do in a technical sense is ignoring the economic ties between the two.
Handwriting interpretation is certainly worth having as an option on any device which can handle it. I have a couple of reservations, though. First is that typical screen/touch resolutions do not, for me, do a satisfying enough job of detecting/showing handwriting. On my Wacom pad, there's enough resolution to detect small writing, but many touch-sensitive devices aren't quite up to it yet. The lower display resolution means you don't get as good visual feedback as with physical writing, and these two factors combine to make me feel clumsy. It probably is quicker than Dasher, it's just that I instinctively compare it to writing on paper, and I can't stop myself finding it annoying.
Having said that, I think that once high-resolution reflective (rather than emissive) screens are commonplace, it would be the system of choice.
My second reservation is based on usage. I like the idea of not having to bother with a stylus for an out-and-about device such as a phone. It's just one more thing to lose, and one more action to take before getting started (do any PDAs automatically unlock as the stylus is taken from it's slot? That would mitigate against my criticism).
I think we're going to see more and more input methods based on pre-computer techniques; the key ones are writing and speech, although hopefully some other haptic methods will become possible. I recall reading that a group of researchers had built physical simulations approaching the required speed for haptic feedback (the hand is much better than the eye at detecting a refresh rate - it has to be many hundreds of times a second to avoid feeling juddery). Despite this, there are times when unphysicality may be more useful, e.g. you only have one hand free (steady) and you don't want to talk outloud (maybe on a train, holding on?).
I don't know much about the OpenMoko architecture, but if there's a way to incorporate a new input method pervasively then it would certainly be worth a go, simply to assess whether it's workable on a mobile device. Dasher is open source - its creator David MacKay is greatly in favour of such things, and releases many (all?) of his academic works online.
I notice there's a tablet PC edition, anyone tried it?
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
This is a '2D' typing system i.e. workable with a mouse or equivalent - could well be quicker with fingers.
I got up to about 15 wpm with minimal practice. Apparently you can get 30 wpm with a bit more. I reckon it could also be tweaked if additional keys were available for certain very common words, and if the underlying probability model was trained to your personal habits.
More crazily, a phone or similar with acceleration detection could also incorporate whole-phone movements. So you might write a word with Dasher (or whatever), and then flick your wrist to the right for a space, left for a comma, away from you for a full stop, down for a carriage return, etc. Or you could make a system like Monkeyball on the Wii, where Dasher works with a pseudo-physical simulation of a ball on the screen, which you 'roll' to select letters and words (sorry, not very clearly explained if you've not used Dasher and played Monkeyball - an elite minority!).
I'm sure everything else you say is correct, but heating a glass of water with a 1.5V AA battery? You sure? I once put a 15cm long, 5mm diameter spring, probably 300 turns or so, across one of those bad-boys and it gave me a nasty burn really fast! I guess maybe it would have run down pretty quickly if I hadn't dropped it, though.
A possible rebuttal:
I've read an account of the development of early civilisations which stresses almost the opposite explanation. The mediterranean basin is an easier place to grow food (if not hunt/gather), leading to more sedentary leisure time, thus more pondering, thus more technological developments, thus even more leisure time and so on. Consider: the Egyptians relied on a uniquely ideal environment around the Nile.
An analogy could be made with Britain and the industrial revolution. Success was not driven by hardship and necessity, but by ideal environmental conditions (rivers and coastline) for developing manufacturing and naval industries.
It is possible that the initial impetus to move from hunter-gatherer to arable farmer was driven by greater need in cooler climes, but then again how would one survive long enough to work out how to farm if the envrionment didn't provide enough food to live at least several years? (I suppose simply storing autumnal wild foods might do, actually).
Anyway, I don't think the 'forced to be inventive' thing can be a complete explanation, as even if it were briefly true, the necessity of invention ended the moment agrarian society was established, and that was thousands of years ago at least.
Well, in this instance, at least one of the monkeys would immediately type the complete works of Shakepseare in their entirety. In fact, I reckon an infinite number of them might do it. Also, an infinite number of monkeys would come up with better versions of the complete works of Shakespeare and, sadly, an infinite number of worse versions of the complete novels of Jeffrey Archer.
Hear hear. Our desire as consumers should pretty much always be for more competition, with the caveat that someone needs to be around to apply pressure for interoperability. Sometimes the market takes care of this (e.g. cars have all ended up working roughly the same way, computer hardware tends to move from one standard to another with (annoying, but necessary) interim periods), and occasionally the government should step in (e.g. ensuring the basic postal services all co-operate), or some other body (e.g. W3C).
The number of cartels around annoys me. Personally, I think once a production/service/information industry has become an oligopoly it should be broken up. Conversely, I think pure infrastructure elements should be nationalised. Take the UK train system: it's all very well having train companies compete (not that they really do, but in theory), but track companies? I mean, it's not competition over how good the track is, it's competition over who can write the best application for tender and convince the government to give them the contract. What sort of qualification is that?
I believe the OLPC project is not aimed at countries/children who are starving. It is aimed at (rural?) communities that are largely self-sufficient, but lack the excess resources required to drastically improve their lot beyond its current level. In many of these places children already go to school. The idea is to reduce the cost of one of the most versatile resources humanity has created, and hopefully enable an acceleration of socio-economic development.
Some of these places may well be at risk from famine, but history has shown that simply rescuing countries from such disasters when they occur, while necessary and highly laudable, is insufficient in itself to help progress, and prevent their reoccurrence.
You're correct that there appear to be ways the money could be better spent, but bear in mind that another aim of the project is to have the machines built locally. This means two things: 1) there are wider economic benefits which will be driven by local needs (contrast this with the all-too-common misapplication of external aid); and 2) there isn't actually that much money behind this project, in the grand scheme of things--I think the staff is less than 20--so suggesting that the money is being misspent is something of a straw-man, even if unintentional.
Read Permutation City!
It's possible the difference you're describing is not to do with the underlying 'guessing' algorithm, but the IO layer, i.e: if a first layer encoded the text according to thesaurus-style meaning groups (with a certain amount of context-sensitivity to account for homonyms), and then the algorithm produced a 'reply' guess based on this semantic encoding, and finally the first layer decoded (with random diction), you'd have an effect similar to the one you describe.
Admitedly, the grammatical interpretation process here is not trivial, but even Word does it to a certain extent (yes, I know it's famously bad at certain constructions, but one can at least see how they could be improved). Of course, it wouldn't quite do what you describe until the 'meaning units' are considerably longer than single words, and this would mean the first layer would have to be a good deal more sophisticated. However, that sort of pattern-grouping is another area in the same domain as compression algorithms (consider fractal compression), so it's not ridiculous to relate them to AI, even if you don't accept that the problems are a 1:1 match.
A criticism of what I've written above would be that the specific algorithm under discussion in TFA is unlikely to be as suitable for guessing these theoretical semantic units as plain text. This is true, however it doesn't negate the underlying point that some other algorithm built around another data model might display qualities necessary to pass the Turing test, one perhaps built around lessons learnt from this breakthrough.
Good point, and you've indirectly raised what I feel is the key issue here. Is there any difference between an idea that relates to the real world, and one which relates purely to a virtual world? Key points to consider might be: the distinction (if any) between a virtual world and its medium; the extent to which the real world can be treated as consisting entirely of information; and how do you value something with unrestricted supply?
There's a great book called Permutation City which, despite at least one logical flaw in its plot, is an excellent crowbar for one's mind on this topic. Well worth reading. It does address the question of needs of the real world vs needs of the simulation, and concludes in this case that the container will exercise control. Things that exist only in the simulation do have influence, because they control certain flows of information and intelligence, but as they become more sophisticated (including being intelligent), they necessarily become more self-referential and less relevant.
In this particular case, it becomes difficult for outsiders to relate the internal value to the simulation to value in the real world. One can guess that the claimant wouldn't be interested in virtual justice, because the value of the virtual world to him is in real-world money. Here we're back to the potentially thorny problem of how money (increasingly admitted to be a thing with purely informational existence, sometimes represented with physical objects, since countries began decoupling monetary value from comodities) relates to informational products. This is also tied up in some of the issues with media sharing going on at the moment.
Gosh, I have wittered on. Anyway, highly recommend Permutation City and a good economics textbook if you want some interesting insights on how the future of ICT might look.
A very sensible post. However, I think the GUI (or UI of another kind) always matters, and it would be better to say "if the GUI doesn't speed up or make easier the tasks you want to perform". One of the great things about OSX is flexibility, e.g.: you have a GUI that's efficient for slinging some files around and sorting them by hand, or you can whack open a terminal and batch-process a simple task, or you can get serious and write a script if you're going to be doing the same thing often enough to justify it.
Phone makers in general have not made sufficient intelligent effort to simply reduce the number of clicks required for most tasks, and Apple's success will, as you say, put pressure on in this area. The sad thing is that, with a bit more openness, Apple could have dealt a serious blow in the functionality arena as well (hardware constraints excepted).
The ray of hope is that the problems you outline with the iPhone, and the problems with phones in general, are almost entirely software issues. A bit more competition could work wonders.
Quite right. We have the capability nowadays to let artists cheaply promote and distribute their music online - far less than the cost of instruments and a recording studio. Calling the music companies parasites is a tricky one though. Someone will know better than me on this, but I suspect the total number of professional musicians has risen in line with the size of the recording industry. Now, this wasn't their aim, and I'm not holding them up as morally responsible, I'm just saying there are positive knock-on effects.
Now, it's clear the economics are breaking down (hence all the piracy), and thus the system does need shifting. Mergers have gradually led to a cartel, and prices cannot respond quickly enough to the immense downward pressure of technological advancement. Deflation of music prices is actually pretty high at the moment - average UK album prices have fallen from £11.25 in 2000 to £9.41 in 2007 (this is from retail research I'm doing at the moment) - but anyone can see that, based on the cost of creation and delivery, it should be much, much lower.
Ever use a piece of paper? I know tablet devices haven't properly taken off yet, but I reckon a good interface (think Nintendo DS - an 'interface' screen on the desk and a 'reference' screen where the monitor was) could seriously improve productivity. Throwing bits and pieces around in many applications would be so much quicker with two or more pointers, never mind all the more esoteric scrolling/pinching movements.