At half the price and half the weight this would be kick-ass.
Light, cheap or thin: pick any one. You can spend 2x-3x as much as I paid and get a Lenovo or Fujitsu that is close to your weight requirements. Too rich for my blood.
I do not see anything about Wacom active digitizer, without which this thing is useless for drawing or taking notes. The word stylus is not even on the linked page.
Haven't you heard? After Iphone fetish gadget sites like engadget and gizmodo and all the Apple Polishers have gone gaga for multitouch, it's become fashionable for clueless newbies to touch to get their hate on for the humble-but-useful stylus. Stylii are now basically marketing poison.
However, I can tell you mie came with a stylus and if you look at the HP sales page, there are replacement stylii for sale... Google: tm2 wacom. For more confirmation, look at the drivers on this page - Wacom confirmed there and via PC Magic and lspci. There's even an extensive new bug/patch workup for the Wacom on Lucid.
Just got a Hp Tm2. Capacitive multitouch screen + Wacom pressure-sensitive digitiser screen + huge multitouch trackpad. I added a 3-button scrolling trackball for my own UI preference. 10 watt CULV dual-core CPU. Dual boot Ubuntu and Win7, with each virtualising the physical partition of the other on-demand, and virtual XP and OSx86 just for kicks. Yes, the basic screen UIs such as Gnome and Win7 File Explorer are less than optimal for finger manipulation. But there are so many replacement apps and shells that this is not really an issue. And the ability to avoid the mouse/trackball unless absolutely necessary and directly interact with the objects on screen is both amazing and liberating. I suspect that many of the people who diss on TabletPCs simply haven't really used one, or have not yet found a compelling reason to use one or haven't really looked very much. Personally, I use wanted a tablet for the immediacy of interacting directly on the screen, and the amazingly convenient comic book/ebook/media viewer it enables. I'm no stranger to mechanically disintermediated UIs -- was using a light pen in the early 1980s and a mouse since the Mac came out in the mid-80s -- but after a few years of a touchscreen phone/PDA I simply knew my next PC had to have touch. The irony is that with some deep discounting and some coupons, my TabletPC cost less than the higher-end iPad will cost, *and* it can easily run 1080p from both MKV/AVC and Flash with ease.
I am unimpressed by that MRI image before-and-after, which simply shows localised swelling resolving later on. Cancer risks have been explored enough in this thread, but what about any randomised testing against placebo or sham surgery? It's not like orthopaedics hasn't had repeated booms in lucrative, minimally invasive "treatments" that RCTs have later shown to be no betterthan placebo, or worse if you take the risks into account.
As it is plainly obvious that the slums are not a better place to live, the question, I repeat, is: why?
This is a false dichotomy. Given a choice between two goals closely-ranked in odiousness, but with transfer costs associated in the move from one goal to another, and with the possibility of opportunity cost in the disruption of moving from one to another and the loss of social networks, and with imperfect knowledge, I am not sure that any meaningful question as to "why" can be posed with the surety of an answer that convinces. I'm pretty sure that what exists instead is an equilibrium weighted heavily in terms of transfer rate because of contingent environmental constraints.
There's an obvious contradiction here so the question arises: why?
Because people have always moved from the countryside to the cities. The difference now is that cities have sewage and trash collection and some vaccinated populations and so they are no longer engines for the annihilation of entire cohorts of immigrants. In the pre-modern era in the West, an incredibly high death rate coupled with regular, periodic epidemics ensured that the population of cities turned over quite rapidly and people's psychology was markedly different, especially as it related to personal violence and civil rights. Basically, you were ahead of the median if, after arriving in a city, you lasted 30 years. This had profound effects on people's attitudes, not to mention their economic development. Imagine how difficult it was to establish long-lasting businesses and corporations if 10% of the staff randomly died (ie, not just the ones near retirement) or were rendered infirm every year, and every few years an epidemic killed 20-50% of the population.
The net effect of this was that cities were an incredibly efficient way of absorbing surplus population from the countryside and using it up without requiring an expansion in the size of the city. Only in our modern era have we created a situation where cities can grow at an accelerated rate because of a merkedly reduced death rate. Now the only limit to the size of cities appears to be the restrictions of the transport infrastructure necessary to sustain such a dense population in terms of food and water.
You seem to be asking why people move from the countryside to the city? Well, "countryside" has a fixed surface area, and much of it, especially in countries where the economics of ownership is weighted very heavily to the top of the pyramid, is not owned by the inhabitants but rented, and the extraction of the rent through direct rentiership or through labour on cash crops or the creation of local foodstuffs for commodity extraction is the paramount non-urban socioeconomic behaviour. Thus, as well as a pull phenomenon from cities, there is also a push phenomenon whereby people are literally forced from the land into cities, oftentimes as a precursor for emigration or asylum seeking.
I suggest you read about the history of Ireland in the 19th century. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is as good a place as any to start, and it cleverly links together Ireland India, and China's economic fates, demonstrating how some countries managed to reindustrialise during the modern era while others sank into a funk for a century or so.
There's an explanation for why there are so many Irish-Americans in the world outside Ireland, and it is linked to this push-pull phenomenon coupled with the desire of landowners to clear land for cash crop cultivation and to maximise rentiership. It's a pattern repeated time and again, from the earliest domus plantations of the absentee Roman landowners in North Africa and Gaul during the early first millenium CE to the vast pampas plantations of Argentina during the early modern era. And it's a pattern that forces massive migration of surplus populations from the countryside. Cities are the first magnet destination for the economically displaced... if they are a port then they become a gateway to an overseas destination.
This is one of the single most insightful comments in this thread. New urban megaslums exist because the political structures in those countries have failed to establish a civil society that redistributes the income more fairly among its inhabitants to create situational stability, upward mobility, without too much downward mobility below a certain floor. It is not so much a failure of wealth creation as a failure of political will, or a product of a definite politial will to clear the countryside so as to establish monoculture agriculture to grow cash crops for export to rich countries and to enrich a select few. To compare the slums of Lagos to expensive moored boats in Sausalito, and to imply that all slums are generating a transformation where "the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan", as Brand does, is to insult the intelligence of all but the most criminally naive and deludedly optimistic.
One of the single best books published within the recent few years about the new megaslums is Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. He takes a little bit of a historical detour, illustrating that the phenomenon of urban megaslum is not unique to the late 20th century. There was a single example of amegaslum (that is, a place where 1m+ people subsisted on virtually no income for generations in the context of a markedly unequal society) and that was Dublin, Ireland, during the 19th century following the abolition of the Irish Parliament when the remote British Westminster Parliament basically deindustralised what had been one of the more advanced nations in Western Europe and left it subject to famines and depopulation. Anyway, Davis shows that during the late 19th century economists studied Dublin's inhabitants, wondering how it was that they managed to subsist on so little, and many of their arguments then echo those today from analysts across the political spectrum as they regard an increasingly slummy world where the City of Tomorrow is not made of gleaming postmodernist spies ala Dubai, but in fact is much smellier and grimier, and has no running water or sewage.
That literally billions of people precariously subsist in these cities today is a miracle. To imagine that they will survive the disruptions of the coming water and resource wars of the warming centuries is magnificently optimistic.
I'm copying here a blog post on Metafilter because it has some high-quality links, unlike the Brand/Kelly anti-thought drivel:
Seriously people, this is Roughly Drafted we are talking about here. Sure the zealot in charge has now toned down the abusive comments and graphics on the page and made it look somewhat sanitised, but this is a site that is the Apple equivalent of Little Green Footballs in its heyday. Memorably referred to as the "lunatic fringe of Mac fandom". Pretty much any article on that website is guaranteed to be slanted so much in favour of the Apple Party Line that to expect rational, even analysis is pointless. Flash has worked on dozens of touchscreen devices for years now. Many of these devices have come up with UI and/or gesture cues to invoke the rollover/mouseover state that Flash and Javascript like using (often involving a "pointer mode"). Because of Adobe's new push, Flash will soon be working on hundreds of new devices. As a result, I am sure that both the workarounds and new gestures to replace and to augment rollover will become both more usable and more common.
Ironically, Windows Mobile has had a pretty good Photoshop workalike for most of the past decade as Pocket Artist. On-device editing of PSDs included, along with layers, IPTC/EXIF, brushes, and so on. It's a pretty good demonstration for why there are in fact some compelling use cases for resistive screens with pinpoint accuracy stylii, despite what the capacitive screen absolutists believe.
For the record, years ago Aldus Superpaint was superior to Photoshop for several years on the Mac. It was more responsive, and supported both vector- and bitmap-based rendering.
Obviously the killer app for mobile handset projectors is direct projection onto the user's retina, perhaps aided by adaptive calibration using cams and ultrasound to detect ocular motions/sacaddes,slow pursuits and to respond to them both in real time and in anticipation. I expect eventually this will be on a bunch of phones for 2-3 years but many will disregard it as pointless and most will ignore it or simply be utterly oblivious to it until Apple releases a phone using this technology and dropping a massive marketing budget spamming all media, whereupon everything will be filled with stories of Apple's miraculous game changer that is utterly unlike anything that has gone before.
I've yet to see SuperKendall greet any new Apple offering with anything less than perfect adulation. Seriously, can you think of a single Apple product you thought was a stinker? Because there have been a few you know. Can you bring yourself to name even one?
Simplicity is good, yes, but so are buttons and control surfaces for complex multi-modal devices that can change state instantly and enable the user to proceed simultaneously along very different goal paths with divergent inputs. The pathetically modifier-overloaded Macintosh primary mouse button is a classic example of how Too Much Simplicity can become a very bad thing.
The relative weakness of China over the past century is a very late, very transient and almost completely ahistorical situation. In a fashion similar to only a handful of other such periods in history, China's political and economic system entered into a period of systemic crisis during the early-to-middle 19th century, which culminated in the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), a Christian fundamentalist uprising that, together with itssuccessorrebellions triggered by the general chaos, constitutes in terms of lives lost and the proportional erasure of economic production the single most destructive period of war of that century, and possibly in known history (excepting, of course, the European introduction of plagues and invasion to the world's richest, largest cities in the Americas during the 15th and 16th centuries).
China's misfortune during that period, as distinct from other such periods, was that new travel and transport technology had enabled foreign powers to establish themselves within the political and economic centres of a weakened and siunited China and establish disruptive economic regimes of their own. Coupled with that centuries' invention of new pharmaceutical techniques capable of manufacturing and delivering vast quantities of highly addictive and lucrative opiates, China's position as a Great Power declined significantly from its historical level. What we are seeing now in its re-emergence is not so much a novel emergence of a new Power, but the restoration of one of the oldest continuity Powers to a position more closely approximating normality.
Many hundreds millions of people are getting necessary drugs. But many hundreds of millions are not. Transporting drugs at cartel prices from developed nations or even manufacturing them under licence has the effect, still, of restricting access to those drugs for poorer at literally orders of magnitude less cost, and also retarding the development of manufacturing and research industries within developing countries dedicated to producing their own drugs at fractional cost. Sometimes "aid" has the effect of eliminating development, a pattern we've seen again and again enacted in post-colonial economic systems.
grant money freely given to them
Grant money given along with conditions that it be spent within certain cartels with pricing set not by market forces but by manufacturers' lobbies is not "money freely given". Especially because the manufacturers get a double benefit: sales proceeds and tax credits because of their "charity" in selling their drugs "below cost" (that is, below the high cost they claimed they could seel these drugs for, whereas in reality their sales at these prices in developing countries would have been close to zero).
As for "mass murderer", well, that wa snot my choice of phrase. It's a matter of perspective. In a couple of hundred years, when people are writing the history of late capitalism, they will add up the death toll, the literally billions of people who were allowed to die over a century or so because of the need to maintain the IP cartel system. Whether they will call that "mass murder" or "acceptable outcomes" depends on what economic system occupies the greatest mindshare in the most historians, and how out contingent, transient stage of late capitalism is viewed by them.
In an analogous system, think of the hundreds of millions who perished because of slavery, that is, the labor-intensive practices of early capitalism designed to produce agricultural commodities within monocultures at low cost. At the time, even though many agitated against it, the slavery system was regarded for generations as a necessary evil. With time, as the utilisation of fossil fuels and the employment of non-slaved masses within the system industrialisation replaced slave labor, the slave system lost mindshare. It began to be seen not as something desirable and even ordained by God, but as an unnecessary evil. For the most part, its economic output was replaced by in-situ colonialism, a system whereby the laboring masses were forcibly employed within the borders of coutnries rather than being transported en masse to remote destinations. In time, that economic system also lost relevance and was supplanted by more efficient modes of production and consumption.
Regimes change. Until it had developed sufficiently and established its own R&D and scientific regimes, the USA was one of the world's largest "pirate" nations. Right up until the start of the 20th century it was notorious for ignoring and refusing to recognise the IP and copyright systems of the "established" economic empires, allowing its industries to "steal" what they needed to ramp up their manufacturing. The more expensive products from the empires rarely had much chance of succeeding in the USA, unless they either sold at radically low cost or sub-contracted out their manufacturer at very unfavourable terms to native USA companies. Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Have anything to back this up, or are you just talking out of your ass?
There's this new thing called The Google. It works really well. You just type something like "Gates.Foundation drug patents" and it lets you start to find out things for yourself. In this case, the first few links will lead you to find out about UNTIAID. Basically, the story goes like this. During the 1990s, developing nations (especially India and Brazil) began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely. At the start of the Noughties, a crisis was looming when several companies, mainly Indian, began retailing vast quantities of anti-HIV/malaria/TB drugs to poorer countries (mostly African) at costs way below what Western companies were prepared to sell at. For a while it looked as if literally half the world was ready to secede from the international patent system in an effort to provide medication for as many of their sick populations as possible. After several rounds of negotiation, within which the Gates and Clinton foundations were major players, a compromise was established. Rich Western countries, NGOs, and foundations made it clear that their aid money was contingent on poorer countries recognising Western patents and refusing to buy from "rogue" companies or countries. In return, their access to grant/loan/development monies was assured, and several cartels and exchanges established whereby these countries could purchase Western patent-protected medications or the right to produce such medications at "below market" costs (but still literally several times the cost of producing such medications outside the patent system). UNITAID is one of these exchanges. The Gates foundation is one of the major players in UNITAID, and its lobbying recently has concentrated on maintaining relatively high remuneration fees to the Western IP holders, thereby maintaining relatively high costs for the drugs. For the poorer countries, it's a classic Faustian bargain: they get grant money, but they have to spend much of this money buying higher-priced drugs. Given the public-private partnerships and funding/tax arrangements, it's a classic example of corporate welfare where grant money nominally allocated to developing countries is funnelled back to Western IP holders, either as actual cash or as tax deferments.
Sprint is either third or fourth largest in the US in terms of customers and covers both less people and less geographic area than AT&T or Verizon
Ironically, Sprint's also-ran status actually works out very well if you are a data-heavy user. My Sprint plan roams on Verizon for free, and the handoff between networks is transparent. Because of the low contention rates for EVDO-a on Sprint (compared to, say, AT&T), I've been enjoying bandwidth around 2-3x what I see similar smartphones on AT&T and TMobile attain (Except for the newer 4G experimental zones). I've actually tethered the phone, on occasion, for several days and used it to download GB+ torrents. The video streaming also works nicely. I get unlimited data, texts, and a voice plan for $30/month, all-in. Yes, it's one of the old SERO plans, and with plans like this I think can see how Sprint manages to not extract nearly as much profit as AT&T and Verizon.
There are around half a dozen such browsers/apps with varying degrees of support for different levels and profiles of Flash. Skyfire is a recent entrant that has become popular. Some use server-side presentation/deployment, others use on-device rendering. The fact that you are apparently unaware of the existence of such apps compels me to doubt the rest of the content of your comment.
Given that I am often multitasking with my visual attention, I actually *prefer* devices with a goodly number of well-placed buttons with tactile feedback. The haptic phone screens pioneered by Samsung are a poor substitute, and the dead glass screens favoured by Apple are simply terrible for feedback and apparently designed to demand the operator's full attention be focussed on the screen and the UI operation. Which is how Apple likes it, but not really what I want from a device that I like to operate in an unplanned environment and often remotely within a pocket or similar. Apple has consciously designed its handheld devices like this, in a way that foregrounds the operation and forces the operator to unveil the device. Effectively acting as a walking marketing billboard. It's a clever strategy, and one that appeals to a lot of people who mistake ersatz design minimalism for real usability simplicity.
Wouldn't it be just as plausible that after Apple put in the 2 years of development that it was LG that was the industrial spy and just cranked up their impressive capability to beat the iPhone to market?
That's an interesting assumption without any basis in reality, or even a preponderance of evidence in its favour. Consider this. LG has been in the business of mobile phones for two decades. It designs and delivers several dozen models a year (in fact, it's the world's third-largest phone manufacturer, literally dwarfing Apple's numbers by an order of magnitude). It is also actually Apple's main supplier of displays. Its R&D spend makes Apple's look like pocket change, and it has close to 200,000 employees, most of whom are not retail store clerks posing as "genii". Finally, if you think that LG was able to somehow purloin operational and design details of Apple's phone years before it was revealed, than you have a very different understanding of how the industry works, and how Apple's notorious internal surveillance works.
The impressive thing about LG's rollouts is how quick they are. The LG was already being shipped by the first week of 2006, and was on sale in Europe before the end of January. That's a full six months before Apple's second attempt at a mobile phone hit the streets, and at least two eons in mobile phone time.
Don't underestimate the Koreans. They also invented the first mp3 player... although a lot of people mistakenly attribute that to Apple as well. (I am not counting Kane Kramer's unique 1980s DAP because they entered public domain and everyone had access to them).
It's amusing that this sort of mindless consumerist jingoism should be spewed by someone from the USA, which has until recently exhibited such drastically low subscriber ARPUs and unit penetrance that pretty much all manufacturers and cellcos didn't even bother to release any of their high-end phones in that country. Relegated to a backwater in the global mobile business, the USA would probably have remained so for many years had Apple's success with its high-end featurephone not encouraged them to begin to accelerate deployment of better models within the USA. However, because US consumers are still markedly stingy when it comes to paying for services, the USA's selection of phones and services is still quite poor. Why do you think all the large billing and distribution companies are EU or Asian? That's where the real money is. Half a billion high-spending EU consumers, 2 billion high-spending Asian consumers. The USA can muster up 300m low-payers, and many of them are effectively locked into multi-year hire-purchase schemes by incumbent and regional cellcos. Just not that attractive a proposition.
Also, I believe that the "Japan" thing you are rferring to is, again, not based on sales, but in fact the recent impression monitoring and market research by Admob (now part of Google). The same surveyors also found that only 22% of Japanese mobile consumers wanted to carry a "smartphone", with just under 50% saying that a simple call phone was "enough". Also, the recent Japanese growth of 350% in mobile Safari impressions is coming from a long period of virtually no growth, and a tiny installed base. It's easy to show 350% growth in one quarter if your installed base is tiny. Maintaining that for a full year will prove more difficult. Even with the sales boost, Japan's Iphone consumers still represent only 3% of total global Iphone consumers. By comparison, the UK accounts for 8%.
I'm sure you're going to counter these statements by some ill-informed personal assertion without anything in the way of links of reason. However, I am done with this line of debate. The links speak for themselves.
smartphone penetration is actually rather large, and probably will be the majority of sales in two years or so.
According to Gartner, 2009 Q3 worldwide mobile phone sales were 309m units (with effectively zero growth over 2008 Q3). Gartner-defined smartphones sold 41m units, representing a 12.8% growth over 2008 Q3. Assuming that total mobile phone sales remain flat in 2010 compared to 2009 (a not-unreasonable assumption given recent historical sales data and market dynamics), then for smartphones to become a "majority of sales" within two years, we will need to see annual growth close to 100% or so. Less if you're brave enough to predict a reduction in the absolute number of mobile phones sold. However, this is still several multiples of the maximum compound growth rates smartphones have ever been able to achieve in their best years (and that was with much smaller installed bases).
It seems as if, from your bullish comments, you're in possession of some very different data than most people, or that you have somehow come to a conclusion very different from what most people perceive as reality. I'm guessing that you disagree with Gartner's most recent 2012 smartphone prediction:
The complete Gartner forecast for smartphone OSes by the end of 2012 puts Symbian on top with 203 million devices sold, and 39% of the market. Android will be second with nearly 76 million units sold, and 14.5% of the market.
Coming in a close third, the iPhone will ship on 71.5 million devices in 2012, giving a 13.7% market share. Windows Mobile will finish fourth, with 66.8 million units sold, or 12.8% of the market.
Very close behind Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS will sell on 65.25 million devices in 2012, Gartner forecasts, making it fifth with 12.5% market share.
Various Linux devices will sell 28 million units, at 5.4% market share, in sixth place. Palm Inc.'s webOS will sell on 11 million units in 2012, about 2.1% of the market, in seventh place, Gartner says.
Android will have moved up the most from 2009 to 2012, from sixth place to second. BlackBerry will have moved down the most, from second to fifth, while iPhone will remain in third position and Windows Mobile will remain in fourth position.
And you're thinking very provincially. The USA is not the entire world, but you have read this random survey and apparently made that error, extrapolating actual global sales share from a prospective US-based consumer poll (with purchase characteristics and mobile market dynamics very peculiar and specific to the USA). Also, I note from that very survey that the Iphone future purchase share in those US consumers surveyed actually dropped 8 market points overall (44% to 36%) compared to an earlier June survey. Finally, surveys like this speak to current buying behaviour and do not address installed platform bases.
Slashdot Mirror
At half the price and half the weight this would be kick-ass.
Light, cheap or thin: pick any one. You can spend 2x-3x as much as I paid and get a Lenovo or Fujitsu that is close to your weight requirements. Too rich for my blood.
I do not see anything about Wacom active digitizer, without which this thing is useless for drawing or taking notes. The word stylus is not even on the linked
page.
Haven't you heard? After Iphone fetish gadget sites like engadget and gizmodo and all the Apple Polishers have gone gaga for multitouch, it's become fashionable for clueless newbies to touch to get their hate on for the humble-but-useful stylus. Stylii are now basically marketing poison.
However, I can tell you mie came with a stylus and if you look at the HP sales page, there are replacement stylii for sale... Google: tm2 wacom. For more confirmation, look at the drivers on this page - Wacom confirmed there and via PC Magic and lspci. There's even an extensive new bug/patch workup for the Wacom on Lucid.
Just got a Hp Tm2. Capacitive multitouch screen + Wacom pressure-sensitive digitiser screen + huge multitouch trackpad. I added a 3-button scrolling trackball for my own UI preference. 10 watt CULV dual-core CPU. Dual boot Ubuntu and Win7, with each virtualising the physical partition of the other on-demand, and virtual XP and OSx86 just for kicks. Yes, the basic screen UIs such as Gnome and Win7 File Explorer are less than optimal for finger manipulation. But there are so many replacement apps and shells that this is not really an issue. And the ability to avoid the mouse/trackball unless absolutely necessary and directly interact with the objects on screen is both amazing and liberating. I suspect that many of the people who diss on TabletPCs simply haven't really used one, or have not yet found a compelling reason to use one or haven't really looked very much. Personally, I use wanted a tablet for the immediacy of interacting directly on the screen, and the amazingly convenient comic book/ebook/media viewer it enables. I'm no stranger to mechanically disintermediated UIs -- was using a light pen in the early 1980s and a mouse since the Mac came out in the mid-80s -- but after a few years of a touchscreen phone/PDA I simply knew my next PC had to have touch. The irony is that with some deep discounting and some coupons, my TabletPC cost less than the higher-end iPad will cost, *and* it can easily run 1080p from both MKV/AVC and Flash with ease.
I am unimpressed by that MRI image before-and-after, which simply shows localised swelling resolving later on. Cancer risks have been explored enough in this thread, but what about any randomised testing against placebo or sham surgery? It's not like orthopaedics hasn't had repeated booms in lucrative, minimally invasive "treatments" that RCTs have later shown to be no better than placebo, or worse if you take the risks into account.
As it is plainly obvious that the slums are not a better place to live, the question, I repeat, is: why?
This is a false dichotomy. Given a choice between two goals closely-ranked in odiousness, but with transfer costs associated in the move from one goal to another, and with the possibility of opportunity cost in the disruption of moving from one to another and the loss of social networks, and with imperfect knowledge, I am not sure that any meaningful question as to "why" can be posed with the surety of an answer that convinces. I'm pretty sure that what exists instead is an equilibrium weighted heavily in terms of transfer rate because of contingent environmental constraints.
There's an obvious contradiction here so the question arises: why?
Because people have always moved from the countryside to the cities.
The difference now is that cities have sewage and trash collection and
some vaccinated populations and so they are no longer engines for the
annihilation of entire cohorts of immigrants. In the pre-modern era in
the West, an incredibly high death rate coupled with regular, periodic
epidemics ensured that the population of cities turned over quite
rapidly and people's psychology was markedly different, especially as
it related to personal violence and civil rights. Basically, you were
ahead of the median if, after arriving in a city, you lasted 30 years.
This had profound effects on people's attitudes, not to mention their
economic development. Imagine how difficult it was to establish
long-lasting businesses and corporations if 10% of the staff randomly
died (ie, not just the ones near retirement) or were rendered infirm
every year, and every few years an epidemic killed 20-50% of the
population.
The net effect of this was that cities were an incredibly efficient
way of absorbing surplus population from the countryside and using it
up without requiring an expansion in the size of the city. Only in our
modern era have we created a situation where cities can grow at an
accelerated rate because of a merkedly reduced death rate. Now the
only limit to the size of cities appears to be the restrictions of the
transport infrastructure necessary to sustain such a dense population
in terms of food and water.
You seem to be asking why people move from the countryside to the
city? Well, "countryside" has a fixed surface area, and much of it,
especially in countries where the economics of ownership is weighted
very heavily to the top of the pyramid, is not owned by the
inhabitants but rented, and the extraction of the rent through direct
rentiership or through labour on cash crops or the creation of local
foodstuffs for commodity extraction is the paramount non-urban
socioeconomic behaviour. Thus, as well as a pull phenomenon from
cities, there is also a push phenomenon whereby people are literally
forced from the land into cities, oftentimes as a precursor for
emigration or asylum seeking.
I suggest you read about the history of Ireland in the 19th century. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is as good a place as any to start, and it cleverly links together Ireland India, and China's economic fates, demonstrating how some countries managed to reindustrialise during the modern era while others sank into a funk for a century or so.
There's an explanation for why there are so many Irish-Americans in
the world outside Ireland, and it is linked to this push-pull
phenomenon coupled with the desire of landowners to clear land for
cash crop cultivation and to maximise rentiership. It's a pattern repeated time and again, from the earliest domus plantations of the absentee Roman landowners in North Africa and Gaul during the early first millenium CE to the vast pampas plantations of Argentina during the early modern era. And it's a pattern that forces massive migration of surplus populations from the countryside. Cities are the first magnet destination for the economically displaced... if they are a port then they become a gateway to an overseas destination.
who the hell are you to judge?
Because I am better than you.
Go to a slum. Go work in a slum. Go read about the history of India in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then get back to me.
Slums are good for people who don't live in them.
This is one of the single most insightful comments in this thread. New urban megaslums exist because the political structures in those countries have failed to establish a civil society that redistributes the income more fairly among its inhabitants to create situational stability, upward mobility, without too much downward mobility below a certain floor . It is not so much a failure of wealth creation as a failure of political will, or a product of a definite politial will to clear the countryside so as to establish monoculture agriculture to grow cash crops for export to rich countries and to enrich a select few. To compare the slums of Lagos to expensive moored boats in Sausalito, and to imply that all slums are generating a transformation where "the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan", as Brand does, is to insult the intelligence of all but the most criminally naive and deludedly optimistic.
One of the single best books published within the recent few years about the new megaslums is Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. He takes a little bit of a historical detour, illustrating that the phenomenon of urban megaslum is not unique to the late 20th century. There was a single example of amegaslum (that is, a place where 1m+ people subsisted on virtually no income for generations in the context of a markedly unequal society) and that was Dublin, Ireland, during the 19th century following the abolition of the Irish Parliament when the remote British Westminster Parliament basically deindustralised what had been one of the more advanced nations in Western Europe and left it subject to famines and depopulation. Anyway, Davis shows that during the late 19th century economists studied Dublin's inhabitants, wondering how it was that they managed to subsist on so little, and many of their arguments then echo those today from analysts across the political spectrum as they regard an increasingly slummy world where the City of Tomorrow is not made of gleaming postmodernist spies ala Dubai, but in fact is much smellier and grimier, and has no running water or sewage.
That literally billions of people precariously subsist in these cities today is a miracle. To imagine that they will survive the disruptions of the coming water and resource wars of the warming centuries is magnificently optimistic.
I'm copying here a blog post on Metafilter because it has some high-quality links, unlike the Brand/Kelly anti-thought drivel:
Seriously people, this is Roughly Drafted we are talking about here. Sure the zealot in charge has now toned down the abusive comments and graphics on the page and made it look somewhat sanitised, but this is a site that is the Apple equivalent of Little Green Footballs in its heyday. Memorably referred to as the "lunatic fringe of Mac fandom". Pretty much any article on that website is guaranteed to be slanted so much in favour of the Apple Party Line that to expect rational, even analysis is pointless. Flash has worked on dozens of touchscreen devices for years now. Many of these devices have come up with UI and/or gesture cues to invoke the rollover/mouseover state that Flash and Javascript like using (often involving a "pointer mode"). Because of Adobe's new push, Flash will soon be working on hundreds of new devices. As a result, I am sure that both the workarounds and new gestures to replace and to augment rollover will become both more usable and more common.
Ironically, Windows Mobile has had a pretty good Photoshop workalike for most of the past decade as Pocket Artist. On-device editing of PSDs included, along with layers, IPTC/EXIF, brushes, and so on. It's a pretty good demonstration for why there are in fact some compelling use cases for resistive screens with pinpoint accuracy stylii, despite what the capacitive screen absolutists believe.
For the record, years ago Aldus Superpaint was superior to Photoshop for several years on the Mac. It was more responsive, and supported both vector- and bitmap-based rendering.
Obviously the killer app for mobile handset projectors is direct projection onto the user's retina, perhaps aided by adaptive calibration using cams and ultrasound to detect ocular motions/sacaddes,slow pursuits and to respond to them both in real time and in anticipation. I expect eventually this will be on a bunch of phones for 2-3 years but many will disregard it as pointless and most will ignore it or simply be utterly oblivious to it until Apple releases a phone using this technology and dropping a massive marketing budget spamming all media, whereupon everything will be filled with stories of Apple's miraculous game changer that is utterly unlike anything that has gone before.
1) Hate on new Apple product.
Love on new Apple product?
I've yet to see SuperKendall greet any new Apple offering with anything less than perfect adulation. Seriously, can you think of a single Apple product you thought was a stinker? Because there have been a few you know. Can you bring yourself to name even one?
Apple invests a lot of time and money in removing control elements to what an individual needs to make the device a fluid part of their lifestyle.
You're really deep inside that Reality Distortion Field. I think The Onion analysed the situation best with its prescient Macbook Wheel promo:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary Laptop WIth No Keyboard
Simplicity is good, yes, but so are buttons and control surfaces for complex multi-modal devices that can change state instantly and enable the user to proceed simultaneously along very different goal paths with divergent inputs. The pathetically modifier-overloaded Macintosh primary mouse button is a classic example of how Too Much Simplicity can become a very bad thing.
Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler - Albert Einstein
How expensive (or difficult, back before bit torrent) it was to get a development environment up and running on Windows was what drove me to Linux
Right, because something like XAMPP or Cygwin or Eclipse is just plain impossible to obtain without The Bittorrent.
Not working so well with China, is it.
The relative weakness of China over the past century is a very late, very transient and almost completely ahistorical situation. In a fashion similar to only a handful of other such periods in history, China's political and economic system entered into a period of systemic crisis during the early-to-middle 19th century, which culminated in the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), a Christian fundamentalist uprising that, together with its successor rebellions triggered by the general chaos, constitutes in terms of lives lost and the proportional erasure of economic production the single most destructive period of war of that century, and possibly in known history (excepting, of course, the European introduction of plagues and invasion to the world's richest, largest cities in the Americas during the 15th and 16th centuries).
China's misfortune during that period, as distinct from other such periods, was that new travel and transport technology had enabled foreign powers to establish themselves within the political and economic centres of a weakened and siunited China and establish disruptive economic regimes of their own. Coupled with that centuries' invention of new pharmaceutical techniques capable of manufacturing and delivering vast quantities of highly addictive and lucrative opiates, China's position as a Great Power declined significantly from its historical level. What we are seeing now in its re-emergence is not so much a novel emergence of a new Power, but the restoration of one of the oldest continuity Powers to a position more closely approximating normality.
the people are still getting the drugs they need
Many hundreds millions of people are getting necessary drugs. But many hundreds of millions are not. Transporting drugs at cartel prices from developed nations or even manufacturing them under licence has the effect, still, of restricting access to those drugs for poorer at literally orders of magnitude less cost, and also retarding the development of manufacturing and research industries within developing countries dedicated to producing their own drugs at fractional cost. Sometimes "aid" has the effect of eliminating development, a pattern we've seen again and again enacted in post-colonial economic systems.
grant money freely given to them
Grant money given along with conditions that it be spent within certain cartels with pricing set not by market forces but by manufacturers' lobbies is not "money freely given". Especially because the manufacturers get a double benefit: sales proceeds and tax credits because of their "charity" in selling their drugs "below cost" (that is, below the high cost they claimed they could seel these drugs for, whereas in reality their sales at these prices in developing countries would have been close to zero).
As for "mass murderer", well, that wa snot my choice of phrase. It's a matter of perspective. In a couple of hundred years, when people are writing the history of late capitalism, they will add up the death toll, the literally billions of people who were allowed to die over a century or so because of the need to maintain the IP cartel system. Whether they will call that "mass murder" or "acceptable outcomes" depends on what economic system occupies the greatest mindshare in the most historians, and how out contingent, transient stage of late capitalism is viewed by them.
In an analogous system, think of the hundreds of millions who perished because of slavery, that is, the labor-intensive practices of early capitalism designed to produce agricultural commodities within monocultures at low cost. At the time, even though many agitated against it, the slavery system was regarded for generations as a necessary evil. With time, as the utilisation of fossil fuels and the employment of non-slaved masses within the system industrialisation replaced slave labor, the slave system lost mindshare. It began to be seen not as something desirable and even ordained by God, but as an unnecessary evil. For the most part, its economic output was replaced by in-situ colonialism, a system whereby the laboring masses were forcibly employed within the borders of coutnries rather than being transported en masse to remote destinations. In time, that economic system also lost relevance and was supplanted by more efficient modes of production and consumption.
Regimes change. Until it had developed sufficiently and established its own R&D and scientific regimes, the USA was one of the world's largest "pirate" nations. Right up until the start of the 20th century it was notorious for ignoring and refusing to recognise the IP and copyright systems of the "established" economic empires, allowing its industries to "steal" what they needed to ramp up their manufacturing. The more expensive products from the empires rarely had much chance of succeeding in the USA, unless they either sold at radically low cost or sub-contracted out their manufacturer at very unfavourable terms to native USA companies. Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Have anything to back this up, or are you just talking out of your ass?
There's this new thing called The Google. It works really well. You just type something like "Gates.Foundation drug patents" and it lets you start to find out things for yourself. In this case, the first few links will lead you to find out about UNTIAID. Basically, the story goes like this. During the 1990s, developing nations (especially India and Brazil) began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely. At the start of the Noughties, a crisis was looming when several companies, mainly Indian, began retailing vast quantities of anti-HIV/malaria/TB drugs to poorer countries (mostly African) at costs way below what Western companies were prepared to sell at. For a while it looked as if literally half the world was ready to secede from the international patent system in an effort to provide medication for as many of their sick populations as possible. After several rounds of negotiation, within which the Gates and Clinton foundations were major players, a compromise was established. Rich Western countries, NGOs, and foundations made it clear that their aid money was contingent on poorer countries recognising Western patents and refusing to buy from "rogue" companies or countries. In return, their access to grant/loan/development monies was assured, and several cartels and exchanges established whereby these countries could purchase Western patent-protected medications or the right to produce such medications at "below market" costs (but still literally several times the cost of producing such medications outside the patent system). UNITAID is one of these exchanges. The Gates foundation is one of the major players in UNITAID, and its lobbying recently has concentrated on maintaining relatively high remuneration fees to the Western IP holders, thereby maintaining relatively high costs for the drugs. For the poorer countries, it's a classic Faustian bargain: they get grant money, but they have to spend much of this money buying higher-priced drugs. Given the public-private partnerships and funding/tax arrangements, it's a classic example of corporate welfare where grant money nominally allocated to developing countries is funnelled back to Western IP holders, either as actual cash or as tax deferments.
Sprint is either third or fourth largest in the US in terms of customers and covers both less people and less geographic area than AT&T or Verizon
Ironically, Sprint's also-ran status actually works out very well if you are a data-heavy user. My Sprint plan roams on Verizon for free, and the handoff between networks is transparent. Because of the low contention rates for EVDO-a on Sprint (compared to, say, AT&T), I've been enjoying bandwidth around 2-3x what I see similar smartphones on AT&T and TMobile attain (Except for the newer 4G experimental zones). I've actually tethered the phone, on occasion, for several days and used it to download GB+ torrents. The video streaming also works nicely. I get unlimited data, texts, and a voice plan for $30/month, all-in. Yes, it's one of the old SERO plans, and with plans like this I think can see how Sprint manages to not extract nearly as much profit as AT&T and Verizon.
what CE web browser can display SWF objects?
There are around half a dozen such browsers/apps with varying degrees of support for different levels and profiles of Flash. Skyfire is a recent entrant that has become popular. Some use server-side presentation/deployment, others use on-device rendering. The fact that you are apparently unaware of the existence of such apps compels me to doubt the rest of the content of your comment.
there still where too many buttons
Given that I am often multitasking with my visual attention, I actually *prefer* devices with a goodly number of well-placed buttons with tactile feedback. The haptic phone screens pioneered by Samsung are a poor substitute, and the dead glass screens favoured by Apple are simply terrible for feedback and apparently designed to demand the operator's full attention be focussed on the screen and the UI operation. Which is how Apple likes it, but not really what I want from a device that I like to operate in an unplanned environment and often remotely within a pocket or similar. Apple has consciously designed its handheld devices like this, in a way that foregrounds the operation and forces the operator to unveil the device. Effectively acting as a walking marketing billboard. It's a clever strategy, and one that appeals to a lot of people who mistake ersatz design minimalism for real usability simplicity.
Wouldn't it be just as plausible that after Apple put in the 2 years of development that it was LG that was the industrial spy and just cranked up their impressive capability to beat the iPhone to market?
That's an interesting assumption without any basis in reality, or even a preponderance of evidence in its favour. Consider this. LG has been in the business of mobile phones for two decades. It designs and delivers several dozen models a year (in fact, it's the world's third-largest phone manufacturer, literally dwarfing Apple's numbers by an order of magnitude). It is also actually Apple's main supplier of displays. Its R&D spend makes Apple's look like pocket change, and it has close to 200,000 employees, most of whom are not retail store clerks posing as "genii". Finally, if you think that LG was able to somehow purloin operational and design details of Apple's phone years before it was revealed, than you have a very different understanding of how the industry works, and how Apple's notorious internal surveillance works.
the Prada was announced December 2006
The impressive thing about LG's rollouts is how quick they are. The LG was already being shipped by the first week of 2006, and was on sale in Europe before the end of January. That's a full six months before Apple's second attempt at a mobile phone hit the streets, and at least two eons in mobile phone time.
Don't underestimate the Koreans. They also invented the first mp3 player... although a lot of people mistakenly attribute that to Apple as well. (I am not counting Kane Kramer's unique 1980s DAP because they entered public domain and everyone had access to them).
it is the design that infringes
True. That's why it was so amusing to see Apple copying the LG's Prada phone design for the Iphone.
It's amusing that this sort of mindless consumerist jingoism should be spewed by someone from the USA, which has until recently exhibited such drastically low subscriber ARPUs and unit penetrance that pretty much all manufacturers and cellcos didn't even bother to release any of their high-end phones in that country. Relegated to a backwater in the global mobile business, the USA would probably have remained so for many years had Apple's success with its high-end featurephone not encouraged them to begin to accelerate deployment of better models within the USA. However, because US consumers are still markedly stingy when it comes to paying for services, the USA's selection of phones and services is still quite poor. Why do you think all the large billing and distribution companies are EU or Asian? That's where the real money is. Half a billion high-spending EU consumers, 2 billion high-spending Asian consumers. The USA can muster up 300m low-payers, and many of them are effectively locked into multi-year hire-purchase schemes by incumbent and regional cellcos. Just not that attractive a proposition.
Also, I believe that the "Japan" thing you are rferring to is, again, not based on sales, but in fact the recent impression monitoring and market research by Admob (now part of Google). The same surveyors also found that only 22% of Japanese mobile consumers wanted to carry a "smartphone", with just under 50% saying that a simple call phone was "enough". Also, the recent Japanese growth of 350% in mobile Safari impressions is coming from a long period of virtually no growth, and a tiny installed base. It's easy to show 350% growth in one quarter if your installed base is tiny. Maintaining that for a full year will prove more difficult. Even with the sales boost, Japan's Iphone consumers still represent only 3% of total global Iphone consumers. By comparison, the UK accounts for 8%.
I'm sure you're going to counter these statements by some ill-informed personal assertion without anything in the way of links of reason. However, I am done with this line of debate. The links speak for themselves.
smartphone penetration is actually rather large, and probably will be the majority of sales in two years or so.
According to Gartner, 2009 Q3 worldwide mobile phone sales were 309m units (with effectively zero growth over 2008 Q3). Gartner-defined smartphones sold 41m units, representing a 12.8% growth over 2008 Q3. Assuming that total mobile phone sales remain flat in 2010 compared to 2009 (a not-unreasonable assumption given recent historical sales data and market dynamics), then for smartphones to become a "majority of sales" within two years, we will need to see annual growth close to 100% or so. Less if you're brave enough to predict a reduction in the absolute number of mobile phones sold. However, this is still several multiples of the maximum compound growth rates smartphones have ever been able to achieve in their best years (and that was with much smaller installed bases).
It seems as if, from your bullish comments, you're in possession of some very different data than most people, or that you have somehow come to a conclusion very different from what most people perceive as reality. I'm guessing that you disagree with Gartner's most recent 2012 smartphone prediction:
You're about 3 years out of date.
And you're thinking very provincially. The USA is not the entire world, but you have read this random survey and apparently made that error, extrapolating actual global sales share from a prospective US-based consumer poll (with purchase characteristics and mobile market dynamics very peculiar and specific to the USA). Also, I note from that very survey that the Iphone future purchase share in those US consumers surveyed actually dropped 8 market points overall (44% to 36%) compared to an earlier June survey. Finally, surveys like this speak to current buying behaviour and do not address installed platform bases.