Do you still have the original stand for the monitor?
Put the monitor back on its stand. There are laptop 'stands' that have a VESA bolt pattern on the back so you can mount them on a monitor arm. They're like $30 or something on Amazon. Get one of those, put the laptop onto it and put it next to the display at eye level. You can even float it off the side of your desk if you don't have one of those monster desks.
One thing I think the naysayers have consistently (and stubbornly) misunderstood about Jobs is that his verbiage doesn't mean what they think it means.
You have a man who was uncomfortable promising things he couldn't deliver, and yet his defining characteristic was that constantly pushed his people to accomplish the improbable. Like a lot of other CEOs, he's going to tell the customer that an infeasible product idea is not going to work, or is impossible. The difference is that while other companies will take this as gospel and will give up on the idea, or at least defund or marginalize the team that was working on the idea, he kept them working on it.
If he tells you that a 7" tablet won't work, what he actually means is, "It's a shitty experience, and I don't peddle shitty experiences. Come back in a year and ask me again'". If the guy who introduced a tablet that was 1/3rd thinner AND faster than anything you'd ever seen before tells you it's a shitty experience, he's probably right. For now.
I believe that Firefox got popular in the first place because it had decent developer tools before anybody else. So we developed websites that worked on Firefox first, even when our bosses told us not to support Firefox at all. We just didn't talk about it, but the users knew.
Now everybody has decent-ish tools, and it's actually becoming -harder- to make it work on Firefox than other browsers (except IE, nothing will ever be as hard as IE). Particularly in the case of automated testing, which is becoming a huge part of your product roadmap.
I really hate working with people like you. You always end up being a liability. You're not so much fun at parties either.
Not everyone has a bunch of addons going. Your experiences don't define the universe. Christ man, look at the change list for any release of Firefox. They are ALWAYS fixing memory leaks. How can they do that if there are no memory leaks?
It happens to me less and less, but it still happens. The constant denials are the second most irritating part.
These days Firefox often eats itself before it eats my computer, but usually when I finally kill it, it's over 800 MB, 1.2g tops. I can't imagine waiting until 2G.
This happens on my work machine, but that could possibly be Firebug leaking.
I used to support this sort of thing wholeheartedly, but then one niggling detail stuck its head up and now I'm not so sure.
What happens to the dust?
It's one thing to shatter a rock to bits out in the asteroid belt and leave a million microscopic orbiting bodies in the plane of the ecliptic. We could always just bank shot around the asteroid belt to avoid the worst. It's another to have a million microscopic orbiting bodies around earth. People are already biting their nails about the number of satellite fragments we already have.
Have they figured out how to avoid this, or will this be another industry that pollutes first and apologizes later (if at all)?
In cryptography you're looking for a problem that is asymmetric. NP is your ideal, but as a lot of other people have pointed out, practical cryptographic algorithms are a not ideal. IBM actually had a cryptography algorithm based on the TSP once, but they must have found a flaw because it was never popularized.
A lot of people confuse NP and/or 'intractable' with 'impossible'. They do not mean the same thing. Intractable problems are often practically impossible, if for instance it would require more mass than the entire universe to calculate the answer. But since our understanding of physics is incomplete, we can't say for sure how big a 'perfect' computer you'd need to solve a certain problem, so you can't categorically say that it's impossible. All you can say is "we can't do it today." or "That's a problem for my grandchildren to deal with... hopefully."
Remember that for certain inputs an NP-Complete problem can be solved on the back of an envelope. If I tell you to place a dot in the middle of the envelope, and one more or less near each corner, you can find the shortest path in a few minutes. It's an NP complete problem, but it's still trivial to solve. NP is not a magic wall. It all depends on the context (ie, the inputs).
It's one thing to say, "water can't be a problem because there's no water in the design". It's quite another to say, "water can't be a problem because no water can ever get into the reactor".
Earthquake + tsunami = water in reactor Catastrophic flooding = water in reactor
(do these things have sprinkler systems in them? Disaster + fire = water in reactor)
I'm curious how these things behave when water does find its way in...
I was replying to your assertion that islands couldn't make a suitable terminus. As I pointed out, the cable will tear long before that.
And even if we made the cable out of diamond, we don't know how to make an anchor so strong that it can lift an island. So if the cable didn't tear, you'd just rip the anchor out of the ground and it would float away...
This is my favorite but now old joke about FF: FF doesn't have memory leaks! Well, except for the four we fixed in the new version. I've been hearing that story since 2.0, and I appreciated it about as much as you obviously do (which is not at all).
However, this is not entirely true anymore. There's a few sharp people working on improving both the high and the low water mark memory usage in Firefox. You should read this guy's whole blog, but this entry in particular stands out:
There was substantial page fragmentation mis-feature, which was improved for FF 7. When you closed a tab, most of the pages allocated for that tab still had live objects in them. That's bad for memory usage.
I don't say this often. Hell, I never say this: this is one place where the military has the right idea about how to manage people. Or at least, my poor, second-hand understanding of military chain of command suggests that is so.
Non-Commissioned officers are on a separate career path. They are expected to continue managing 'the workers' in some capacity for their whole career. They both know what has to be done and can sympathize with the poor bastards who'll get stuck doing it. They are not expected to seek a C level position. That's not their job. Getting shit done is their job, and no assignment or promotion will ever completely hamper that goal.
Meanwhile, the commissioned officers never manage the workers. Occasionally junior COs will try get things done that are a Bad Idea, and an NCO (eg, a warrant officer) will tell them to "Kindly fuck off, sir.". These people ARE expected to seek a C level position. Perhaps most importantly, if you demonstrate an inability to eventually achieve a C-level position, you may find yourself unwelcome, and encouraged to leave. "Up or Out"
I think where this breaks down when applied to civilians is that we don't distinguish people who DO from people who manage. If you can get things done, we should let you do that until the world ends. If you can't get things done, but you can kinda sorta interact with some people who do, should we really keep you around forever? It seems to me like maybe that's not such a good idea.
Not so sure about the anchor point bit, but the rest seems true.
One of the proposals terminates the cable at a boat. I dunno how they keep the thing from being pulled downwind (other than "because it's in the doldrums"), but the tension on the cable only needs to exceed the weight of the cars, the freight, and the safety margin. If you put too much tension on the cable, you'll snap it. If you're trying to hoist an island off its foundations, that would definitely be 'too much tension'.
We had one of those. His name was Thomas Edison, and he, too, claimed ownership (and in fact, implied creatorship) of all of the inventions of the people who worked for him. Who invented the incandescent bulb? Some poor nameless slob who worked for Edison.
Brin is a particularly appropriate suggestion here, as his recent work has been influenced by precisely this issue, which he calls the Transparent Society. Several of his short stories (sorry, names have slipped my mind), Kiln People, and even Earth (in which one of the subplots involves elderly people who have become busybodies, spending all their time doing surveillance on anybody whom they suspect of being up to no good).
But that's my point: Why would anyone want to recreate a real-world analog? If something is exactly as difficult to perform on the computer as in real-life, what's the benefit to me? This is why you don't have a fully VR system on your desktop right now. id Software has shown us that such a thing is feasible with modern hardware, so it must be some other reason. Which is that it's just that it's the wrong metaphor, and hence it's a pointless pursuit.
A virtual filing cabinet, or a virtual CD rack for that matter, can't hold a candle to a naive directory structure paired with a search function (which Pink Floyd album has my favorite version of 'Time' on it? Damn, can't remember. Now I need to flip through the Pink Floyd section of my CD collection to find it. Fuck it, I'm going to search for time.mp3 instead. Which REM album did 'I am Superman' appear on? I've run into more than a couple REM fans who couldn't tell you).
Which would you rather have at your fingertips: Google as it currently exists, or a virtual Library of Congress that allows you to fly through the stacks? Which is going to get you the information you need quickly, and which one is just counterproductive eye candy?
I can think of a couple of things off the top of my head that would greatly soften the sort of whipsawing you're so concerned about. A feedback mechanism that estimates what the reaction to the price change will be, and sets the new price at something approximating the final price after the demand change occurs, would help. So would staggering the price change so that not everyone in that part of the grid reacts at exactly the same moment.
There's something you've got to understand about the power grid. When demand is low, the first power plants that get shut down are the ones that are most expensive to operate. When there's a strong demand spike, the first plants that get turned on are the ones that have the shortest warm-up time, so that you don't get a brown-out. Generally speaking, the most efficient plants tend to be less reactive to demand spikes. This problem goes double for so-called Green Power, which is typically at the whims of local weather, and hence has virtually zero ability to react to demand.
When the aluminum smelting plant or fifty thousand hair dryers turn on at 7:35 in the morning, you're not using the cleanest power, you're using the most expedient power. If you can find enough devices on the electrical grid that can turn on or off essentially at will, then you can smooth out the power spikes, and raise the demand troughs. This makes the job of the power company easier, it makes demand more stable, and it encourages the use of cleaner-burning plants.
Secondly, photochemical smog is formed by the combination of several pollutants, and ultraviolet light. The resulting smog is more environmentally damaging than the sum of its parts. To the extent that some of these input chemicals will dissipate or break down if given time, you're better off consuming power immediately after sunset, so that these chemicals have all night to break down before sunrise.
Now, what are these at-will power sinks? One design for a home furnace I've seen contains a large array of ceramic blocks in a highly insulated chamber. These are heated with the cheapest energy source available, and then used to heat furnace air and/or your hot water tank. These can be 'topped off' with more heat at any time. Another is electric vehicles, or plug hybrid electric vehicles. EVs, according to most calculations, would nearly double the power demand per household. I'm not familiar with the power draw of so-called PHEVs (plug hybrid electric vehicles, which can recharge its batteries via its ICE or from an electrical socket when parked), so I can't comment on those, but in any case, these vehicles would typically need only a few to half a dozen hours of charge per day, and yet would typically be parked for much longer than this. They could adjust their recharging rate to match certain price points, or even discharge into the grid during especially high price spikes.
All beneficial aspects of all of these scenarios are greatly helped by real-time electricity pricing.
It was pretty obvious that the folks doing the reporting hadn't been briefed at all into what exactly was happenning, and that was a damned shame.
My clearest moment of "damn, did these guys do ANY research before showing up??" came when SpaceShipOne was on descent, followed by two chase planes, and the CNN cameraman got confused as to which one was SpaceShipOne, and zoomed in on one of the chase planes for about ten second, before finally panning over to SSO for the rest of the shot. Uh, wrong plane, bucko.
Yeah, and that was when the -real- fun began. His surgeons put him on a program of PEALING THE SCABS OFF OF HIS FACE on a regular (daily?) basis, to keep the scarring to a minimum. Apparently it worked (he ended up with a little bit of chicken neck, but most of his face looked fine), but man, you couldn't pay me enough or give me enough drugs to go through that.
Marshall Savage (The Millenial Project) figured we could get about 100,000 years of breathable atmosphere on Mars, even without an ionosphere. The way I see it, if we still need Mars badly at that point, we're probably an evolutionary dead-end anyway.
Ignoring for a moment all those cool tidbits they used to scare us with during the Cold War, about how we had enough nukes to vaporize the entire surface of the planet fifty times over...
Did you forget about the nuclear winter? Sounds to me like that one slipped your mind. It doesn't matter if nobody dropped bombs on your when the air above your country is filled with a very deep column of radioactive dust, blotting out the sun for, what was it? Twenty years?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you still have the original stand for the monitor?
Put the monitor back on its stand. There are laptop 'stands' that have a VESA bolt pattern on the back so you can mount them on a monitor arm. They're like $30 or something on Amazon. Get one of those, put the laptop onto it and put it next to the display at eye level. You can even float it off the side of your desk if you don't have one of those monster desks.
One thing I think the naysayers have consistently (and stubbornly) misunderstood about Jobs is that his verbiage doesn't mean what they think it means.
You have a man who was uncomfortable promising things he couldn't deliver, and yet his defining characteristic was that constantly pushed his people to accomplish the improbable. Like a lot of other CEOs, he's going to tell the customer that an infeasible product idea is not going to work, or is impossible. The difference is that while other companies will take this as gospel and will give up on the idea, or at least defund or marginalize the team that was working on the idea, he kept them working on it.
If he tells you that a 7" tablet won't work, what he actually means is, "It's a shitty experience, and I don't peddle shitty experiences. Come back in a year and ask me again'". If the guy who introduced a tablet that was 1/3rd thinner AND faster than anything you'd ever seen before tells you it's a shitty experience, he's probably right. For now.
This is actually a really big deal.
I believe that Firefox got popular in the first place because it had decent developer tools before anybody else. So we developed websites that worked on Firefox first, even when our bosses told us not to support Firefox at all. We just didn't talk about it, but the users knew.
Now everybody has decent-ish tools, and it's actually becoming -harder- to make it work on Firefox than other browsers (except IE, nothing will ever be as hard as IE). Particularly in the case of automated testing, which is becoming a huge part of your product roadmap.
Stop breaking the dev tools, guys.
I really hate working with people like you. You always end up being a liability. You're not so much fun at parties either.
Not everyone has a bunch of addons going. Your experiences don't define the universe. Christ man, look at the change list for any release of Firefox. They are ALWAYS fixing memory leaks. How can they do that if there are no memory leaks?
PS: I have Firebug, Flashblock, and nothing else.
It happens to me less and less, but it still happens. The constant denials are the second most irritating part.
These days Firefox often eats itself before it eats my computer, but usually when I finally kill it, it's over 800 MB, 1.2g tops. I can't imagine waiting until 2G.
This happens on my work machine, but that could possibly be Firebug leaking.
I used to support this sort of thing wholeheartedly, but then one niggling detail stuck its head up and now I'm not so sure.
What happens to the dust?
It's one thing to shatter a rock to bits out in the asteroid belt and leave a million microscopic orbiting bodies in the plane of the ecliptic. We could always just bank shot around the asteroid belt to avoid the worst. It's another to have a million microscopic orbiting bodies around earth. People are already biting their nails about the number of satellite fragments we already have.
Have they figured out how to avoid this, or will this be another industry that pollutes first and apologizes later (if at all)?
In cryptography you're looking for a problem that is asymmetric. NP is your ideal, but as a lot of other people have pointed out, practical cryptographic algorithms are a not ideal. IBM actually had a cryptography algorithm based on the TSP once, but they must have found a flaw because it was never popularized.
A lot of people confuse NP and/or 'intractable' with 'impossible'. They do not mean the same thing. Intractable problems are often practically impossible, if for instance it would require more mass than the entire universe to calculate the answer. But since our understanding of physics is incomplete, we can't say for sure how big a 'perfect' computer you'd need to solve a certain problem, so you can't categorically say that it's impossible. All you can say is "we can't do it today." or "That's a problem for my grandchildren to deal with... hopefully."
Remember that for certain inputs an NP-Complete problem can be solved on the back of an envelope. If I tell you to place a dot in the middle of the envelope, and one more or less near each corner, you can find the shortest path in a few minutes. It's an NP complete problem, but it's still trivial to solve. NP is not a magic wall. It all depends on the context (ie, the inputs).
Look, if we're going to use Science, then we have to stop using bullshit like this. Are you familiar with the solar maximum?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_maximum
They are. Notice anything about 1997 on that graph? The longer term trends are what matter.
It's one thing to say, "water can't be a problem because there's no water in the design". It's quite another to say, "water can't be a problem because no water can ever get into the reactor".
Earthquake + tsunami = water in reactor
Catastrophic flooding = water in reactor
(do these things have sprinkler systems in them? Disaster + fire = water in reactor)
I'm curious how these things behave when water does find its way in...
I was replying to your assertion that islands couldn't make a suitable terminus. As I pointed out, the cable will tear long before that.
And even if we made the cable out of diamond, we don't know how to make an anchor so strong that it can lift an island. So if the cable didn't tear, you'd just rip the anchor out of the ground and it would float away...
This is my favorite but now old joke about FF: FF doesn't have memory leaks! Well, except for the four we fixed in the new version. I've been hearing that story since 2.0, and I appreciated it about as much as you obviously do (which is not at all).
However, this is not entirely true anymore. There's a few sharp people working on improving both the high and the low water mark memory usage in Firefox. You should read this guy's whole blog, but this entry in particular stands out:
http://gregor-wagner.com/?p=36
There was substantial page fragmentation mis-feature, which was improved for FF 7. When you closed a tab, most of the pages allocated for that tab still had live objects in them. That's bad for memory usage.
I don't say this often. Hell, I never say this: this is one place where the military has the right idea about how to manage people. Or at least, my poor, second-hand understanding of military chain of command suggests that is so.
Non-Commissioned officers are on a separate career path. They are expected to continue managing 'the workers' in some capacity for their whole career. They both know what has to be done and can sympathize with the poor bastards who'll get stuck doing it. They are not expected to seek a C level position. That's not their job. Getting shit done is their job, and no assignment or promotion will ever completely hamper that goal.
Meanwhile, the commissioned officers never manage the workers. Occasionally junior COs will try get things done that are a Bad Idea, and an NCO (eg, a warrant officer) will tell them to "Kindly fuck off, sir.". These people ARE expected to seek a C level position. Perhaps most importantly, if you demonstrate an inability to eventually achieve a C-level position, you may find yourself unwelcome, and encouraged to leave. "Up or Out"
I think where this breaks down when applied to civilians is that we don't distinguish people who DO from people who manage. If you can get things done, we should let you do that until the world ends. If you can't get things done, but you can kinda sorta interact with some people who do, should we really keep you around forever? It seems to me like maybe that's not such a good idea.
Not so sure about the anchor point bit, but the rest seems true.
One of the proposals terminates the cable at a boat. I dunno how they keep the thing from being pulled downwind (other than "because it's in the doldrums"), but the tension on the cable only needs to exceed the weight of the cars, the freight, and the safety margin. If you put too much tension on the cable, you'll snap it. If you're trying to hoist an island off its foundations, that would definitely be 'too much tension'.
... and a material of the necessary tensile strength. If we had that, then the money probably wouldn't be that hard to get.
But as someone else replied, apparently this ain't it. Or at least, not yet. A pity, really. I was hoping the same thing.
We had one of those. His name was Thomas Edison, and he, too, claimed ownership (and in fact, implied creatorship) of all of the inventions of the people who worked for him. Who invented the incandescent bulb? Some poor nameless slob who worked for Edison.
Brin is a particularly appropriate suggestion here, as his recent work has been influenced by precisely this issue, which he calls the Transparent Society. Several of his short stories (sorry, names have slipped my mind), Kiln People, and even Earth (in which one of the subplots involves elderly people who have become busybodies, spending all their time doing surveillance on anybody whom they suspect of being up to no good).
But that's my point: Why would anyone want to recreate a real-world analog? If something is exactly as difficult to perform on the computer as in real-life, what's the benefit to me? This is why you don't have a fully VR system on your desktop right now. id Software has shown us that such a thing is feasible with modern hardware, so it must be some other reason. Which is that it's just that it's the wrong metaphor, and hence it's a pointless pursuit.
A virtual filing cabinet, or a virtual CD rack for that matter, can't hold a candle to a naive directory structure paired with a search function (which Pink Floyd album has my favorite version of 'Time' on it? Damn, can't remember. Now I need to flip through the Pink Floyd section of my CD collection to find it. Fuck it, I'm going to search for time.mp3 instead. Which REM album did 'I am Superman' appear on? I've run into more than a couple REM fans who couldn't tell you).
Which would you rather have at your fingertips: Google as it currently exists, or a virtual Library of Congress that allows you to fly through the stacks? Which is going to get you the information you need quickly, and which one is just counterproductive eye candy?
Actually, I have seen the 3d jukebox.
Now, I don't know what demo you saw, but I saw one that only had about 10 CDs in it, and already the screen was starting to get crowded.
So, what happens when you try to deal with 300 CDs using 3D?
I can think of a couple of things off the top of my head that would greatly soften the sort of whipsawing you're so concerned about. A feedback mechanism that estimates what the reaction to the price change will be, and sets the new price at something approximating the final price after the demand change occurs, would help. So would staggering the price change so that not everyone in that part of the grid reacts at exactly the same moment.
There's something you've got to understand about the power grid. When demand is low, the first power plants that get shut down are the ones that are most expensive to operate. When there's a strong demand spike, the first plants that get turned on are the ones that have the shortest warm-up time, so that you don't get a brown-out.
Generally speaking, the most efficient plants tend to be less reactive to demand spikes. This problem goes double for so-called Green Power, which is typically at the whims of local weather, and hence has virtually zero ability to react to demand.
When the aluminum smelting plant or fifty thousand hair dryers turn on at 7:35 in the morning, you're not using the cleanest power, you're using the most expedient power. If you can find enough devices on the electrical grid that can turn on or off essentially at will, then you can smooth out the power spikes, and raise the demand troughs. This makes the job of the power company easier, it makes demand more stable, and it encourages the use of cleaner-burning plants.
Secondly, photochemical smog is formed by the combination of several pollutants, and ultraviolet light. The resulting smog is more environmentally damaging than the sum of its parts. To the extent that some of these input chemicals will dissipate or break down if given time, you're better off consuming power immediately after sunset, so that these chemicals have all night to break down before sunrise.
Now, what are these at-will power sinks? One design for a home furnace I've seen contains a large array of ceramic blocks in a highly insulated chamber. These are heated with the cheapest energy source available, and then used to heat furnace air and/or your hot water tank. These can be 'topped off' with more heat at any time. Another is electric vehicles, or plug hybrid electric vehicles. EVs, according to most calculations, would nearly double the power demand per household. I'm not familiar with the power draw of so-called PHEVs (plug hybrid electric vehicles, which can recharge its batteries via its ICE or from an electrical socket when parked), so I can't comment on those, but in any case, these vehicles would typically need only a few to half a dozen hours of charge per day, and yet would typically be parked for much longer than this. They could adjust their recharging rate to match certain price points, or even discharge into the grid during especially high price spikes.
All beneficial aspects of all of these scenarios are greatly helped by real-time electricity pricing.
It was pretty obvious that the folks doing the reporting hadn't been briefed at all into what exactly was happenning, and that was a damned shame.
My clearest moment of "damn, did these guys do ANY research before showing up??" came when SpaceShipOne was on descent, followed by two chase planes, and the CNN cameraman got confused as to which one was SpaceShipOne, and zoomed in on one of the chase planes for about ten second, before finally panning over to SSO for the rest of the shot. Uh, wrong plane, bucko.
Yeah, and that was when the -real- fun began. His surgeons put him on a program of PEALING THE SCABS OFF OF HIS FACE on a regular (daily?) basis, to keep the scarring to a minimum. Apparently it worked (he ended up with a little bit of chicken neck, but most of his face looked fine), but man, you couldn't pay me enough or give me enough drugs to go through that.
They were coming up with it because Dick Rutan said it live on CNN, while SpaceShipOne was still on descent.
Marshall Savage (The Millenial Project) figured we could get about 100,000 years of breathable atmosphere on Mars, even without an ionosphere. The way I see it, if we still need Mars badly at that point, we're probably an evolutionary dead-end anyway.
Ignoring for a moment all those cool tidbits they used to scare us with during the Cold War, about how we had enough nukes to vaporize the entire surface of the planet fifty times over...
Did you forget about the nuclear winter? Sounds to me like that one slipped your mind. It doesn't matter if nobody dropped bombs on your when the air above your country is filled with a very deep column of radioactive dust, blotting out the sun for, what was it? Twenty years?