TIDBits publishes a terrific extended essay on digital photo post-processing.
These are the AdSense AdWords that show up in the full text feed:
Note the spiffy “next” buttons for more of the same.
WTF?
This is the best Google can do? That post had abundant material for analysis, not to mention the TIDBits URL. At least put in ads for Mac related goods.
Something’s broken. I hope for the sake of Google’s shareholders it’s just a transient glitch.
Charles Stross is in good form with an essay on the post-PC world. It’s the world we’ve been expecting since Netscape Constellation (1996) and Larry Ellison’s proto-netbook (1995). That world became real for me in 2007 (yes, it was that long ago) with the iPhone and in 2008 with the Target netbook [1].
I agree with almost everything he wrote, with one big exception….
… Moreover, the PC revolution has saturated the market at any accessible price point. That is, anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one…
Uhhh, no. PCs are not cheap. Not at all. The iPad is cheap [3], but PCs are very expensive.
Yes, you can buy a “PC” for a pittance. It makes a crummy boat anchor though. If you want it to do something useful you need to buy internet service. Where I live that’s about $600 a year – year after year. Unless you bought a Mac, or are geek enough to go without, you need to buy antiviral software. In theory you also need to $150 or so for Microsoft Office. And good luck with backup.
But that’s not the real cost.
The real cost is that you need an IQ-equivalent of 110 or higher, and a love of debugging and troubleshooting. For most of the population, that’s absolutely unaffordable.
PCs are very, very, expensive. The iPad 2.0, or its rivals to come, can be the poor person’s computer [4].
So Charlie got this one point wrong – but it only strengthens his overall argument. My four month old quad core iMac running 10.6 is an anachronism [2]. Its era is passing. Welcome to the third era of the personal computer.
[1] I thought things would blow up in 2009. Didn’t happen! Microsoft dropped the price of XP to about nothing and crawled back enough control of the netbook to stun the market (same thing they did with Palm in the 90s by the way). It’s still going to happen, but that’s not the first time I’ve been wrong on transition times. I’ve since learned to take my time estimates for technology transitions and triple them.
[2] Charlie also omits the role Digital Rights Management (DRM) plays in driving this transition. DRM is one of the reason there’s so much good software being produced for the iPhone. Your CDs may be worth money some day.
[3] Not least because of the pay-as-you-go capped data plan. That’s as big a deal as the device. Yes, I know iPad’s require a PC-as-peripheral, but that will change within the year.
[4] Of course that’s what the original Mac was – the “computer for the rest of us”. Closed architecture. All applications were to be vetted by Apple. Strict UI standards. Heavy investments in usability and design. Single button mouse. It worked too – it really was easy to use. Much easier to use than OS X. Almost as easy to use as the iPad. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it spirals.
When Sarah Palin bloviates, the media goes mad. When a South Korean military vessel blows up, perhaps from a North Korean missile, things get very quiet.
This is a good thing. Evidently the prospect of WW III does concentrate minds. It’s a sign that our legislators aren’t as stupid as they look.
A recent BBC summary outlines the current public analysis…
BBC News - Seoul's dilemma over sunken warship
The 26 March sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster…… The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.
The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure that its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence.
… suspicion is mounting, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the "most likely" causes.
… "If it's a torpedo firing then that's about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border," he told me. "Unless you have a desire to start World War III then you don't do it…
… If it is shown to be a torpedo that hit the Cheonan, then perhaps it can be seen as retaliation for the fact that North Korea is reported to have come off worse in the most recent naval skirmish.
Or maybe it was an attempt to rally the military around the leadership of the ailing Kim Jong-il, reportedly trying to manage a difficult transition of power to his youngest son.
But others have suggested that it might be the military acting alone, a sign of a dangerous shift in the balance of power inside North Korea, and a far more worrying prospect.
So the options are …
The last is unlikely, the first two are discouraging. I wonder, just based on watching humans for a while, if there isn’t a fourth explanation.
An accident. A blunder. A screw-up.
Remember when the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians? No, that wasn’t US military policy. It was a screw-up.
We now know how crummy the Soviet military infrastructure was before the collapse of the USSR. It’s likely that North Korea’s is in much worse shape. It’s likely their submariners are desperate and ill-trained. it’s a setup for an accident, or for a crazed officer to do something very stupid.
Would the submarine officers confess to having screwed up? In North Korea that would probably be a death sentence – or worse.
My money is on blunder.
Now it’s all about China, which has huge investments in North Korea. It’s all about whether China will decide that North Korea has to end, and, if so, on what terms and timeline.
To the right of us – Greece, Portugal, Spain and perhaps Italy and Ireland (GPSII):
How Reversible Is The Euro- - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
For a long time my view on the euro has been that it may well have been a mistake, but that bygones were bygones — it could not be undone…
…but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands…
…if Greece is in effect forced out of the euro, what happens to other shaky members?
I think I’ll go hide under the table now.
and to the left of us – China:
Andy Xie - I’ll Tell You When Chinese Bubble Is About to Burst - Credit Writedowns
“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”
Sigh. It’s not over. Act I was the NASDAQ (remember the NASDAQ?) tech bubble. Act II was the property/asset bubble. Act III takes place in Europe and China.
It really does feel like a world of hurt down here, and we haven’t even hit Peak Oil (but it’s on the way.)
We all wonder why. Why now? A year ago I made up my personal list of 10 contributing causes (Feb 09) and, recently, I wrote up one way out of America’s particular set of challenges.
Since then I’ve been chipping at the list, looking for the cause of the cause of the cause (etc – go too deep and it’s all entropy). Sure we’ve got above average corruption and economic financialization, but those tendencies have always been with us. This feels like something novel, something that, in modern times, has come along every century or so. (In deep history every 2,000 years or so.)
I’m nominating two independent but self-reinforcing causes – information technology (IT) and the Rise of China and India (RCI, aka globalization).
The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.
RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.
Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible.
The IT transformation is not stopping. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are more than 350 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa.
Think about that for a minute.
In five years Africa will have at least 500 million 2010 iPhone/Droid interconnected equivalent devices, and Google’s sentence-salad English/China translation will probably work. I’m still thinking we miss Kurzweil’s 2045 catastrophe, but the prelude will be rough enough.
RCI and IT (RCIIT?) Alone each would have thrown the world for a loop. Together they’ve put us into an entirely new level of future shock.
We might as well get used to it.
... I'd like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author's License and Collecting Society, titled "What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. ..
... restricting the survey to focus on main-income authors (those who earned over 50% of their income from writing) gave median earnings of £23,000 and mean earnings of £41,186.
... the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors' incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor— while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74...
... In addition to being a wildly unstable, lonely occupation with an insane income spread, there are other drawbacks to being a writer. Many American writers are forced to rely on a day job, or a spouse with a day job, for health insurance: health insurance for the self-employed is prohibitively expensive, especially for the self-employed poor. Those who don't have a job that provides healthcare, or a partner with family benefits, are never more than one accident away from bankruptcy. As the median age for publishing a first novel is around 34 because it takes a lot of life experience before you know enough to write something worth publishing, most authors are in the age range 34-70 — old enough that they're likely to develop chronic health conditions or need expensive treatments. (To be fair, it's not just authors who get the short end of this particular shitty stick: I suspect the US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks in general.)...
...So here's the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can't get health insurance (if you're American).... As a business, it's a dead-end: you can't generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee's hands...
Cohen - Beating the Mideast’s Black Hole - NYTimes.com
.... That meeting concluded with Mitchell saying: “You asked if I think Netanyahu is serious. They ask the same question. You are an expert on Palestinian and Israeli politics. They are the same. But no one in the world knows American politics better than me, and this I will say. There has never been in the White House a president that is so committed on this issue, including Clinton who is a personal friend, and there will never be, at least not in the lifetime of anyone in this room." ...Act Two: Obama: Transportation and transparency
... The establishment of well-connected walking and bicycling networks is an important component for livable communities, and their design should be a part of Federal-aid project developments. ... transportation agencies should plan, fund, and implement improvements to their walking and bicycling networks, including linkages to transit...
... transportation agencies should give the same priority to walking and bicycling as is given to other transportation modes. Walking and bicycling should not be an afterthought in roadway design
... children should have safe and convenient options for walking or bicycling to school and parks..
... DOT encourages bicycle and pedestrian accommodation on bridge projects including facilities on limited-access bridges with connections to streets or paths...
..Current maintenance provisions require pedestrian facilities built with Federal funds to be maintained in the same manner as other roadway assets. State Agencies have generally established levels of service on various routes especially as related to snow and ice events...
... The Secretary shall not approve any project or take any regulatory action under this title that will result in the severance of an existing major route or have significant adverse impact on the safety for nonmotorized transportation traffic and light motorcycles, unless such project or regulatory action provides for a reasonable alternate route or such a route exists." 23 U.S.C. 109(m)....There is a difference between Obama and the GOP alternative. A vast, huge, multifaceted, every day in every way difference.
How Noise Can Help Quantum Entanglement: Scientific American
... In the modern view that has gained traction in the past decade, you don’t see quantum effects in everyday life not because you are big, per se, but because those effects are camouflaged by their own sheer complexity. They are there if you know how to look, and physicists have been realizing that they show up in the macroscopic world more than they thought...
... This work suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, entanglement can persist in large, warm systems—including living organisms. “This opens the door to the possibility that entanglement could play a role in, or be a resource for, biological systems,” says Mohan Sarovar of the University of California, Berkeley, who recently found that entanglement may aid photosynthesis ... In the magnetism-sensitive molecule that birds may use as compasses, Vedral, Elisabeth Rieper, also at Singapore, and their colleagues discovered that electrons manage to remain entangled 10 to 100 times longer than the standard formulas predict...
Appraising the brain's energy budget (PNAS 2002)
... In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight. Remarkably, despite its relatively small size, the brain accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body (1). This high rate of metabolism is remarkably constant despite widely varying mental and motoric activity...
Something has changed over the past year with our iPhone voice services around our home (Macalester-Groveland, St Paul, Minnesota) and, to a lesser extent, along my commute (St. Paul to Roseville).
Voice services have gone from mediocre to intolerably bad. The “bars” are meaningless; even with 3-4 “bars” connection failures and call drops are ubiquitous. We can’t reliable make or receive calls from our home, which is rather a problem since we don’t have long distance landline service.
Curiously data services (3G) are doing well. We’ve tried turning off 3G services at home (EDGE only) to see if voice connections improves, but that doesn’t help enough. I suspect local AT&T carrying capacity is the problem, not wireless signal.
We rely on our iPhones for a lot of things, but we need voice services.
I understand that iPhone-class technology, and the absurdity of flat-rate data service pricing, has put a great deal of strain on AT&T’s networks. I understand that our community is resistant to installing new cell towers. That understanding does not translate into sympathy. Our family is paying, I’m chastened to confess, thousands of dollars for services AT&T is not delivering.
There are things AT&T could do. They could end their insane flat-rate pricing, and institute pay-per-use bundles with similar value but user-aligned incentives. They could provide us with a free AT&T 3G MicroCell (aka femtocell) along with discounts for use. They could give us substantial discounts on their mobile services pending a fix.
They’re not doing any of these things. Instead of providing free MicroCells and discounted services, for example, AT&T charges for their femtocell solution.
I miss the days when it was possible to initiate class action lawsuits for failure to deliver contracted services.
If some other company gets iPhones in June our family will switch. We have only one under-contract iPhone and we can sell it and pay the AT&T penalty.
If no other company gets iPhones, I will find out how good Droid really is.
Update: A computer generated (location customized) AT&T response has some relevant details:
… We see that the coverage around your home is considered to be our best coverage and it includes 3G service. We also see that there is a planned tower about 2 miles from your home at Osceola and Lexington Parkway S. This tower is slated to be operational mid August 2010…
…Please contact Customer Care at 611 from a cell phone or at 1-800-331-0500 from landline phone if the problem persists. Have your wireless device available to allow for proper troubleshooting if problems persist…
So even though our coverage is failing on multiple phones, AT&T considers it to be pretty good. There’s something wrong there.
The 3 miles tower is too far away to help us directly, but it’s close enough to reduce the burden on our proximal towers. On the other hand by August we’ll have the 2010 iPhone and the 3G iPad – so any additional local AT&T capacity will be swamped.
If you do try to phone the 800 number, check the gethuman recommendations:
Press "1" at the system asking for your phone number, and then press "0" at next prompt.
Things are unlikely to improve.
When we think about science, most of us think of dramatic breakthroughs. We think Darwin and Wallace, Einstein and Bohr, Copernicus and Curie and we imagine everything changed overnight.
Most science, however, develops in bits and pieces, twisting and turning, waxing and waning, until, after thirty years, things are new. Even the dramatic shifts, like natural selection, took decades to get from radical to mainstream.
If you’re at all curious about things, you notice this in a single lifespan. Consider deep history; the story of humans from 150K to 3K years ago. In the past 30 years discoveries from genomics, climate research, linguistics, plant research, translation, anthropology and archaeology, combined with the revision of old biases, have dramatically changed our understanding of deep history. In each case, of course, computation has been a fundamental driver. That’s how it works – new instruments make new science.
It’s been growing slowly from all directions, but the sum is a very different world from what some of us learned in the 1970s. The human brain is evolving and changing far more dramatically than we imagined, and that evolution has not slowed with modernity. Our concepts of human speciation are being transformed; there were many “species” of human coexisting into deep history – and, like dogs and wolves, they probably crossed often.
Pre-agricultural humans were far more populous and widespread than we once imagined; the large populations of pre-invasion (early agricultural and hunter-gatherer) North America probably reflect worldwide pre-agricultural patterns.
Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?
What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have. They seem more … Neandertal.
Fascinating times, and there’s much more here than I can address in one post. That’s why I’m adding a new tag (label) for this blog -- “deep history” in anticipation of much more to come.
For now see also:
... Softkey ...purchased The Learning Company for $606 million in cash and then adopted its name...Brøderbund was purchased by The Learning Company in 1998 for about US$420 million in stock...
In a move to rationalize costs, The Learning Company promptly terminated 500 employees at Brøderbund the same year,[16] representing 42% of the company's workforce.
Then in 1999 the combined company was bought by Mattel for $3.6 billion ... Jill Barad, the [Mattel] CEO, ended up being forced out in a climate of investor outrage.
This kind of churn is death to software. Software needs continuity to survive. The cycle of acquisition and 'rationalization" creates zombie software that staggers on, brainless, for years ... then dies.Mattel then gave away The Learning Company in September 2000 to Gores Technology Group, a private acquisitions firm, for a share of whatever Gores could obtain by selling the company. In 2001, Gores sold The Learning Company's entertainment holdings to Ubisoft, and most of the other holdings, including the Brøderbund name, to Irish company Riverdeep.[19] Currently, all of Brøderbund's games, such as the Myst series, are published by Ubisoft...
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was created more than twenty years ago, and was first published in 1987. Software MacKiev’s involvement goes back to 1998 when our company developed version 9 for the Macintosh — both the US and UK editions. Then, a decade later, we had the opportunity to get involved with Mavis Beacon again — this time as the developer and publisher of a new generation of Mavis Beacon software for Mac OS X. We are so pleased and proud to be bringing the kind of quality you’ve come to expect from the creative labs of Software MacKiev to this new edition.
... Software MacKiev develops and publishes only the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 2008 and 2009 Deluxe, International, and School Editions for Mac OS X. The previous versions of Mavis Beacon were made for really old Macs with OS 9 by a company called Broderbund. A company called Encore has since taken over the broderbund.com Web site and continue to distribute the outdated software, which — as you point out — doesn’t work as it should...
