As long as hardware is improving exponentially there is an important role for software as a product. Just think of the computer gaming industry as an example. There are many new opportunities for innovation as hardware improves dramatically. And of course, as software becomes a bigger and bigger piece of each "hardware" product, programming as a profession is unlikely to die out. More likely everyone becomes a programmer to some extent.
As the conservative commentator David Brooks has lamented, the Republican party has developed a strong anti-intellectual bias. Since reporting is a rather intellectual activity it's not surprising if this causes a media backlash.
counterproductive speculation
on
Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Jobs is 53 and has no life threatening illness. The cancer he had in 2004 was of a type that usually doesn't recur, and both Apple and Jobs have said that it hasn't recurred. Thus the odds are that Jobs will be in charge for at least the next decade. There's no point in speculating on how Apple would do without him that far in the future. TFA is just "analyst talk" directed at manipulating the stock price.
If you do a Google search for "apple developer forums" the top hit is the developer discussion at "discussions.apple.com". Most of the discussion there at the moment is about iPhone development. This discussion is in no way private.
This is a bad idea for many reasons, but most obviously because the people using the computers may not be the thieves. For example, the thieves may have sold the computers on eBay. The buyers would have no particular way of knowing that the computers are stolen, and so your vigilante justice would involve attacking the wrong people.
. The solution is probably a system framework with which applications can register small helper programs to perform specific tasks. The framework can then ensure they don't use too much CPU or RAM and optimise their network access to reduce the amount of time the radio is on.
I agree, particularly about the radios. Scheduling a very limited communication task to happen when the radios are turned on for other reasons (e.g., checking email) is a capability I would expect to be added soon. I think people forget that Apple's interest here is to do everything they can legally do to make the iPhone as useful as possible, so they can sell more. They've already made it clear that they're allowing VOIP and MMS and many other things that naysayers were sure they would never allow. Current limitations are an expedient first cut and will obviously get fine tuned.
[According to Steve Jobs] Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan. High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product. (from John Sculley's 1987 memoir, "Odyssey").
You make it sound like Jobs was somehow just lucky, since Sculley had business wisdom on this side. I'm surprised that everyone here seems so negative towards Jobs. I've seen very positive comments elsewhere about working with him, and he certainly has some obviously admirable characteristics. His commencement speech at Stanford is worth looking at.
Why is it that 99% of the developer reaction I've seen has been enthusiastically positive, and yet the spin here is so negative? Apple has dramatically exceeded people's expectations and are even allowing VOIP applications that use WiFi. When the competitive landscape in the cellphone world changes and the carriers just become dumb pipes, Apple will be the first to drop stupid restrictions, since their interests will be completely aligned with users: they make their money on hardware, not software. And why does every discussion like this devolve into AAPL=MSFT? Apple are winning here because they have good products, not because they are kneecapping their competitors to try to maintain a monopoly for mediocre products.
Here's a video of the moven suit. The discussion after it points out that their suit costs $60K USD.
It's nice to see people going after the low-cost end that would make this kind of thing ubiquitous. Hopefully they won't be hindered by patents (Xsense has an unpublished patent application related to this).
The posting talks about "Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers..."
This is incorrect. Jobs only said they have to fight the unlock. The actual quote of what he said is,
Q: What are you going to do about iPhone unlocking?
Steve: This is a constant cat and mouse game. We play it on iPods with DRM. We promised music companies to stay ahead of this problem. We try to stay a step ahead. It's going to be the same way here with the iPhone. It's our job to keep them from breaking in. That's job security.
In fact, last week Greg Joswiak, a high level marketing guy at Apple, said that Apple would neither forbid nor support native code on the iPhone/Touch. (He initially said something a bit more positive, but later corrected it since he thought people would read too much into it).
A cell will never mutate a complete flagellum in a single mutation. And nothing but a comlpete flagellum is required in order for cells to have them, Therefore according to Darwinism, the flagellum does not exist.
Do you seriously think that you can invalidate an enormously productive and well verified theory by pointing to an example that you claim hasn't been explained? You're wrong about that particular example not being understood, but it doesn't really matter: the basic premise of science is that we don't know it all! That doesn't prove that we don't know anything. Stop taking your antibiotics too soon, and see if your "invalidation" of evolution protects you from the bacteria evolving into a superinfection that kills you. That would be a nice example of natural selection in action.
I've phrased this as a question coming from a Biologist (which I'm not) to lend some extra authority to the implication "evolution is science". Of course what this question is really addressing is the so-called "Religious War on Science" and the contrast between a "reality-based" presidency and a "faith-based" presidency. So it might be even stronger to ask a question about how the candidates decide who and what to believe. Maybe something like,
There has been criticism that the current administration is not "reality based" and in fact at least one senior Bush aide has gone on record saying that they "create their own reality." A lot of us out here are worried about another "faith-based" presidency that would value strong convictions and unchangeable beliefs over competence and the adherence to proven scientific methods of questioning everything and working hard not to fool yourself into seeing what you expect. You have publicly stated that you don't believe in Darwinian Evolution, something that Biologists would claim they see operating every day in their laboratories. Are they mistaken when they claim to see the evolution of drug-resistant strains of bacteria? Is there any evidence that scientists could present that would shake your strong convictions about this question?
Rather than ask whether they believe in evolution, why not ask if they believe in the Scientific method? Maybe the right question to ask the candidates is something like:
We can all see how successful the methods of Science have been at discarding wrong ideas about Nature that were widely believed for thousands of years, and we depend upon the ability of scientists to discover and correct mistakes in their ideas in order to build our wondrous technologies. The same scientific methods that have led us to computers and airplanes have brought us modern medicine and biology. As a biological researcher, the framework of Darwinian Evolution is as essential to my work as a microscope or a centrifuge. Do you believe that I should teach anything in my Biology classes that hasn't survived the rigorous testing of the scientific method?
The cell phone networks compete. WiMAX (802.16e) is currently being built out by several companies with up/down rates of 70Mbps over short distances and 10Mbps at 10km. The fastest HSDPA already runs at 14.4Mpbs. In Japan, DOCOMO is currently working on deploying their Super 3G network, which runs at 300Mbps downstream, 80Mps upstream. We don't need complicated laws to fix this industry -- just laws that allow competition. If the current monopolies that own the wires and cable can't solve the last mile problem, others will.
If all they do is watch porn, that's a problem. But if the existence of something they're very interested in (porn) on the Internet prompts them to learn how to make the computers work and to use search engines and to find out how to get around porn filters, etc., that's obviously motivating them to learn some useful skills! And while they're on that search engine, they may have some other questions that they're interested in...
Is it only rich countries that are allowed to benefit from porn providing motivation for the adoption of new technologies?
Biologists are getting good at sequencing DNA very fast. This is done by breaking many copies of the DNA up into little overlapping pieces which are separately sequenced; then these overlapping subsequences are fit together, like a puzzle. A bunch of mostly intact DNA would be a lot like a bunch of mostly intact copies of the same puzzle. I would expect that it should be possible to get a completely correct sequence as long as the DNA in some of the cells isn't too badly damaged. They could also get a lot of help in this process from the sequences of close modern relatives. Synthesizing a complete undamaged copy of the DNA should eventually be possible. Maybe it could be done by doing search/replace using the diff's from a modern relative?
Soldering in the battery seems like a good engineering decision to me.
Since batteries have gotten better over the years, it is unlikely they will need to be replaced in the life of the phone. Battery contacts are a significant point of failure. Having a battery door and users opening the phone ads a significant point of failure. For the iPod, there is a third party market for battery replacement that charges a fraction of the price that Apple does to replace the battery. High capacity cheap external battery packs are available for iPods if you're worried about running out of charge on the road.
On the mac you can use utilities supplied with the free firewire SDK to record unencoded mpeg transport streams from your cable box (for me this includes the PBS HD stations). Alternatively, use the free program iRecord to schedule recordings and change channels. All you need is a firewire cable. Apps such as VLC and MPlayer can play back the recorded video.
Using ZFS or even a big cheap RAID array as a backup or archiving target addresses short term issues but not long-term safety of archival data.
For the long term you have the issues of scaling and data migration of your archive. You need to minimize the chance of losing data due to hardware, software or human failures even as your storage scales up exponentially with time. You need to be able to incrementally/non-disruptively replace your backup disks and servers and networks as hardware becomes old and/or obsolete. You need to maintain accessibility and robustness of old data by migrating old data to new media. Businesses also need to worry about regulatory and best-practices enforcement of retention policies: some data you're required to guarantee won't get modified or deleted for mandated periods of time (and you must be able to prove that it hasn't been modified). There are commercial "archiving on disk" solutions that "solve" all of these problems (including eliminating risks due to the corruptible and failure-prone human components), but they involve a hell of a lot more than than ZFS and HA Linux!
I haven't watched anything live in awhile, but that's because I don't watch sports and don't care who got kicked off American Idol. The last time I watched something live was when the Democrats took over the house and senate. If I could have, I would have watched Steve Job's last Keynote live. I think there are enough events that people want to see live that there will still be a place for some video content distributed using a realtime mechanism.
I don't think you're being dishonest, but Dermatologists would disagree with you.
According to the Gilchrest article I cited, Dermatologists believe that no amount of exposure to summer sun is completely safe, since the UV needed to produce vitamin D is exactly the same range of frequencies that cause DNA damage and skin aging. Also, according to this article, not only is oral vitamin D just as effective as that produced by the body, but in fact all of the large studies that show benefits of higher doses of vitamin D have been conducted using oral vitamin D. To quote from the abstract of the study cited in the original post, "it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day".
The Gilchrest article also points out that you can get the full vitamin D benefit from sunlight even if you use a high SPF sunscreen, since you only need the equivalent of a few minutes unprotected exposure. Tans are pretty, but there is a cost that is paid later in life.
According to the Gilchrest article, 2 to 8 minutes of exposure to direct summer sunlight is all it takes for a light skinned Caucasian to reach a plateau in their manufacture of the precursor to vitamin D. It then takes several hours for this to turn into vitamin D. So hours of whole-body exposure doesn't actually produce more vitamin D than just a few minutes.
I'm not in this field, so someone else should comment on whether sunlight has additional benefits for psoriasis over oral vitamin D. It seems reasonable that very short (and regular) exposure causes only minimal long term damage.
The "controversy" about the health benefits of sun exposure is fueled mainly by the tanning industry. All of the large studies on which the health benefit claims are based (including the one cited here) used oral vitamin D, not sun exposure. To quote from the abstract of a recent article in The Journal of steroid biochemistry and molecular biology (B. Gilchrest, March 2007),
Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a proven carcinogen, responsible for more than half of all human malignancies. It also compromises skin appearance and function. Since the UV action spectra for DNA damage, skin cancer and Vitamin D(3) (vit D) photosynthesis are identical and vit D is readily available from oral supplements, why has sun protection become controversial, now that some data suggest conventionally "sufficient" levels of vit D may be less than optimal for at least some population groups? First, the media and apparently some researchers are hungry for a new message. Nevertheless, after 50 years, UV exposure is still a major avoidable health hazard. Second, the controversy is fueled by a powerful special interest group: the indoor tanning industry. They target not the frail elderly or inner-city ethnic minorities, groups for whom evidence of vit D insufficiency is strongest, but rather fair-skinned teenagers and young adults, those at highest risk of UV photodamage. Third, evolution does not keep pace with civilization. When nature gave man the appealing capacity for vit D photosynthesis, the expected lifespan was far less than 40 years. Long-term photodamage was not a concern, and vit D was not available at the corner store. The medical community should avoid sensationalism and instead rigorously explore possible cause-and-effect relationships between vit D status and specific diseases while advocating the safest possible means of assuring vit D sufficiency.
There are very clear problems with the patent system, but it is a misconception to think that it helps to outlaw software patents. Were things any better when software patents were disguised as device patents? Any piece of software is ultimately implemented in a physical device.
Suppose, for example, that advancing the timing on a car engine reduces emission of some pollutant. Can this be covered by a patent as long as you use mechanical devices to advance the timing, but not if you use a computer chip? What if you use digital logic rather than software?
The abstraction of method from implementation is exactly the difference between patents and copyright. If you want to fix the patent system, you need to fix the whole patent system. Outlawing software patents doesn't fix anything.
The facts here seem very unclear. First of all, there has been no confirmation from WalMart as to which format they are buying. Also, a $300 Blu-Ray player is already on sale in China!
Slashdot Mirror
As long as hardware is improving exponentially there is an important role for software as a product. Just think of the computer gaming industry as an example. There are many new opportunities for innovation as hardware improves dramatically. And of course, as software becomes a bigger and bigger piece of each "hardware" product, programming as a profession is unlikely to die out. More likely everyone becomes a programmer to some extent.
As the conservative commentator David Brooks has lamented, the Republican party has developed a strong anti-intellectual bias. Since reporting is a rather intellectual activity it's not surprising if this causes a media backlash.
Jobs is 53 and has no life threatening illness. The cancer he had in 2004 was of a type that usually doesn't recur, and both Apple and Jobs have said that it hasn't recurred. Thus the odds are that Jobs will be in charge for at least the next decade. There's no point in speculating on how Apple would do without him that far in the future. TFA is just "analyst talk" directed at manipulating the stock price.
If you do a Google search for "apple developer forums" the top hit is the developer discussion at "discussions.apple.com". Most of the discussion there at the moment is about iPhone development. This discussion is in no way private.
This is a bad idea for many reasons, but most obviously because the people using the computers may not be the thieves. For example, the thieves may have sold the computers on eBay. The buyers would have no particular way of knowing that the computers are stolen, and so your vigilante justice would involve attacking the wrong people.
I agree, particularly about the radios. Scheduling a very limited communication task to happen when the radios are turned on for other reasons (e.g., checking email) is a capability I would expect to be added soon. I think people forget that Apple's interest here is to do everything they can legally do to make the iPhone as useful as possible, so they can sell more. They've already made it clear that they're allowing VOIP and MMS and many other things that naysayers were sure they would never allow. Current limitations are an expedient first cut and will obviously get fine tuned.
You make it sound like Jobs was somehow just lucky, since Sculley had business wisdom on this side. I'm surprised that everyone here seems so negative towards Jobs. I've seen very positive comments elsewhere about working with him, and he certainly has some obviously admirable characteristics. His commencement speech at Stanford is worth looking at.
Why is it that 99% of the developer reaction I've seen has been enthusiastically positive, and yet the spin here is so negative? Apple has dramatically exceeded people's expectations and are even allowing VOIP applications that use WiFi. When the competitive landscape in the cellphone world changes and the carriers just become dumb pipes, Apple will be the first to drop stupid restrictions, since their interests will be completely aligned with users: they make their money on hardware, not software. And why does every discussion like this devolve into AAPL=MSFT? Apple are winning here because they have good products, not because they are kneecapping their competitors to try to maintain a monopoly for mediocre products.
Here's a video of the moven suit. The discussion after it points out that their suit costs $60K USD.
It's nice to see people going after the low-cost end that would make this kind of thing ubiquitous. Hopefully they won't be hindered by patents (Xsense has an unpublished patent application related to this).
The posting talks about "Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers..."
This is incorrect. Jobs only said they have to fight the unlock. The actual quote of what he said is,
Q: What are you going to do about iPhone unlocking?
Steve: This is a constant cat and mouse game. We play it on iPods with DRM. We promised music companies to stay ahead of this problem. We try to stay a step ahead. It's going to be the same way here with the iPhone. It's our job to keep them from breaking in. That's job security.
In fact, last week Greg Joswiak, a high level marketing guy at Apple, said that Apple would neither forbid nor support native code on the iPhone/Touch. (He initially said something a bit more positive, but later corrected it since he thought people would read too much into it).I've phrased this as a question coming from a Biologist (which I'm not) to lend some extra authority to the implication "evolution is science". Of course what this question is really addressing is the so-called "Religious War on Science" and the contrast between a "reality-based" presidency and a "faith-based" presidency. So it might be even stronger to ask a question about how the candidates decide who and what to believe. Maybe something like,
There has been criticism that the current administration is not "reality based" and in fact at least one senior Bush aide has gone on record saying that they "create their own reality." A lot of us out here are worried about another "faith-based" presidency that would value strong convictions and unchangeable beliefs over competence and the adherence to proven scientific methods of questioning everything and working hard not to fool yourself into seeing what you expect. You have publicly stated that you don't believe in Darwinian Evolution, something that Biologists would claim they see operating every day in their laboratories. Are they mistaken when they claim to see the evolution of drug-resistant strains of bacteria? Is there any evidence that scientists could present that would shake your strong convictions about this question?
Rather than ask whether they believe in evolution, why not ask if they believe in the Scientific method? Maybe the right question to ask the candidates is something like:
We can all see how successful the methods of Science have been at discarding wrong ideas about Nature that were widely believed for thousands of years, and we depend upon the ability of scientists to discover and correct mistakes in their ideas in order to build our wondrous technologies. The same scientific methods that have led us to computers and airplanes have brought us modern medicine and biology. As a biological researcher, the framework of Darwinian Evolution is as essential to my work as a microscope or a centrifuge. Do you believe that I should teach anything in my Biology classes that hasn't survived the rigorous testing of the scientific method?
The cell phone networks compete. WiMAX (802.16e) is currently being built out by several companies with up/down rates of 70Mbps over short distances and 10Mbps at 10km. The fastest HSDPA already runs at 14.4Mpbs. In Japan, DOCOMO is currently working on deploying their Super 3G network, which runs at 300Mbps downstream, 80Mps upstream. We don't need complicated laws to fix this industry -- just laws that allow competition. If the current monopolies that own the wires and cable can't solve the last mile problem, others will.
If all they do is watch porn, that's a problem. But if the existence of something they're very interested in (porn) on the Internet prompts them to learn how to make the computers work and to use search engines and to find out how to get around porn filters, etc., that's obviously motivating them to learn some useful skills! And while they're on that search engine, they may have some other questions that they're interested in...
Is it only rich countries that are allowed to benefit from porn providing motivation for the adoption of new technologies?
Biologists are getting good at sequencing DNA very fast. This is done by breaking many copies of the DNA up into little overlapping pieces which are separately sequenced; then these overlapping subsequences are fit together, like a puzzle. A bunch of mostly intact DNA would be a lot like a bunch of mostly intact copies of the same puzzle. I would expect that it should be possible to get a completely correct sequence as long as the DNA in some of the cells isn't too badly damaged. They could also get a lot of help in this process from the sequences of close modern relatives. Synthesizing a complete undamaged copy of the DNA should eventually be possible. Maybe it could be done by doing search/replace using the diff's from a modern relative?
Soldering in the battery seems like a good engineering decision to me.
Since batteries have gotten better over the years, it is unlikely they will need to be replaced in the life of the phone. Battery contacts are a significant point of failure. Having a battery door and users opening the phone ads a significant point of failure. For the iPod, there is a third party market for battery replacement that charges a fraction of the price that Apple does to replace the battery. High capacity cheap external battery packs are available for iPods if you're worried about running out of charge on the road.
On the mac you can use utilities supplied with the free firewire SDK to record unencoded mpeg transport streams from your cable box (for me this includes the PBS HD stations). Alternatively, use the free program iRecord to schedule recordings and change channels. All you need is a firewire cable. Apps such as VLC and MPlayer can play back the recorded video.
Using ZFS or even a big cheap RAID array as a backup or archiving target addresses short term issues but not long-term safety of archival data.
For the long term you have the issues of scaling and data migration of your archive. You need to minimize the chance of losing data due to hardware, software or human failures even as your storage scales up exponentially with time. You need to be able to incrementally/non-disruptively replace your backup disks and servers and networks as hardware becomes old and/or obsolete. You need to maintain accessibility and robustness of old data by migrating old data to new media. Businesses also need to worry about regulatory and best-practices enforcement of retention policies: some data you're required to guarantee won't get modified or deleted for mandated periods of time (and you must be able to prove that it hasn't been modified). There are commercial "archiving on disk" solutions that "solve" all of these problems (including eliminating risks due to the corruptible and failure-prone human components), but they involve a hell of a lot more than than ZFS and HA Linux!
I haven't watched anything live in awhile, but that's because I don't watch sports and don't care who got kicked off American Idol. The last time I watched something live was when the Democrats took over the house and senate. If I could have, I would have watched Steve Job's last Keynote live. I think there are enough events that people want to see live that there will still be a place for some video content distributed using a realtime mechanism.
I don't think you're being dishonest, but Dermatologists would disagree with you.
According to the Gilchrest article I cited, Dermatologists believe that no amount of exposure to summer sun is completely safe, since the UV needed to produce vitamin D is exactly the same range of frequencies that cause DNA damage and skin aging. Also, according to this article, not only is oral vitamin D just as effective as that produced by the body, but in fact all of the large studies that show benefits of higher doses of vitamin D have been conducted using oral vitamin D. To quote from the abstract of the study cited in the original post, "it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day".
The Gilchrest article also points out that you can get the full vitamin D benefit from sunlight even if you use a high SPF sunscreen, since you only need the equivalent of a few minutes unprotected exposure. Tans are pretty, but there is a cost that is paid later in life.
According to the Gilchrest article, 2 to 8 minutes of exposure to direct summer sunlight is all it takes for a light skinned Caucasian to reach a plateau in their manufacture of the precursor to vitamin D. It then takes several hours for this to turn into vitamin D. So hours of whole-body exposure doesn't actually produce more vitamin D than just a few minutes.
I'm not in this field, so someone else should comment on whether sunlight has additional benefits for psoriasis over oral vitamin D. It seems reasonable that very short (and regular) exposure causes only minimal long term damage.
There are very clear problems with the patent system, but it is a misconception to think that it helps to outlaw software patents. Were things any better when software patents were disguised as device patents? Any piece of software is ultimately implemented in a physical device.
Suppose, for example, that advancing the timing on a car engine reduces emission of some pollutant. Can this be covered by a patent as long as you use mechanical devices to advance the timing, but not if you use a computer chip? What if you use digital logic rather than software?
The abstraction of method from implementation is exactly the difference between patents and copyright. If you want to fix the patent system, you need to fix the whole patent system. Outlawing software patents doesn't fix anything.
The facts here seem very unclear. First of all, there has been no confirmation from WalMart as to which format they are buying. Also, a $300 Blu-Ray player is already on sale in China!