Lacy Ice + Heat

Siri and Apple's long history of anticipating voice/touch/agent user interfaces

2012-01-23T10:06:00.001-07:00

The USPTO has just published the first heavyweight Siri-related Apple patent application, and Patently Apple makes it almost comprehensible. Of particular interest in that article, is this speculative Apple-created video from 1987…

deep truth from an irreverent crew

2012-01-12T10:24:00.001-07:00

This link leads to the last few minutes of the 13th and final episode of what should probably, on the whole, be called a mockumentary, based on a group visit to North Korea.

progress, and the factors which constrain it

2011-12-31T17:18:00.001-07:00

While the timing of the transition from one year to the next is arbitrary, an artifact of the choices made in calendar design, the passing of time is at least a persistent illusion, and the metamorphosis which accompanies it convincing. "The times, they are a-changin'", as a younger version of Bob Dylan once sang. Change has been a frequently recurring factor in the lives of myself and my contemporaries, like a stressed and agitated Earth repeatedly shifting beneath our feet, and much of it at least seemingly not for the better.

I say "at least seemingly" because for any change there will be cascading effects which are difficult to predict at the time, and these cascading effects often interact in surprising ways, so even if you find it hard to believe in "progress" you can still place hope in serendipity.

Having a basic education in biology, the way I see progress is informed by the simple rule of thumb about plant nutrition I once learned, that the growth of a plant is constrained by whatever nutrient is least available (relative to the proportions in which all nutrients are needed). Similarly, progress depends on all of the necessary conditions being in place, or at least acquirable, not just one or two of them, and resources spent on bringing the limiting factor(s) up to snuff yield the most bang for the buck.

So what is/are the limiting factor(s) hindering progress? I can think of a few.

One has been the cost of computation, but it could scarcely be called a limiting factor anymore, even though many applications remain for which the necessary processing capacity continues to be prohibitively expensive, and/or too power hungry. Much that hasn't yet been done could be done within the limits of current technology.

Another is the knowledge and experience to make good use of that computational power. This too is changing, but it's trailing behind the improvement in computing hardware. I'm referring here not only to software but to techniques for interfacing with the physical world, the sensors and actuators of robotics, and the integration of all these into working systems.

Less obviously, but perhaps more importantly, progress has been constrained by what we have (habitually) used these improving technologies to do. To riff on the old saying about when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, we have, until quite recently, treated every new thing to come along as another kind of hammer, and measured its value in terms of how good it was at driving nails. In other words, we haven't been much interested in changing what we do, only the details of how we do it. I believe people are generally ready to climb out of this rut, if they could rely upon mutual support in doing so.

Progress has also been limited by how we organize ourselves, primarily driven by the conservatively defined interests of capital. There's been a great deal of experimentation with alternative ways of bringing people together to do creative/productive work collaboratively, much of it supported by venture capitalists, but there's still a lot of inertia in the old way of doing things and not yet enough successful counter-examples to point to, or enough general experience with participating in them.

And finally, there is a tremendous need for remedial education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, most of which will have to be conducted remotely, via self-instructional packages, video courses, or mass media. I believe this deficit to be the twin product of the counterculture's rebellion against all things technical and a resurgence of the thread of anti-intellectualism that runs through western culture, which can perhaps be traced to Celtic pride in the lack of a written language, but which in any case has been encouraged by those who find a well-informed, clear-thinking populace inconvenient.

Most of us are in a position to work on one or another of these, even if for now it's only to educate ourselves. Let's get to it!

reforming agriculture through more sophisticated mechanization

2011-12-10T14:28:00.001-07:00

Historically, at least since the mechanization of agriculture began in earnest, there have been two primary measures of agricultural productivity, the amount that could be grown on a given acreage and the percentage of the population required to feed all of us. The former, measured in bushels or tons per acre, has generally been increasing and the latter, measured in man-hours per bushel or ton, decreasing for at least the last hundred years, albeit more so for some crops than for others. (A consequence of the decreasing need for labor to produce many staples has been the migration of the children of farmers to cities, where they helped keep the cost of labor low in other enterprises.)

Corn (maize) is a good example of a crop for which these conventional measures of productivity tell a story of brilliant progress, with the result that corn is cheap enough to use not only as livestock feed, to be converted into meat and dairy products, but as the feedstock for production of ethanol for fuel, competing with fuels refined from petroleum pumped from the ground, rather remarkable considering that corn kernels represent only a small fraction of the biomass of a corn plant and that fermentation and distillation aren't particularly efficient processes.

Crops that fair less well by these measures include many vegetables and most fruits, which have been becoming gradually more expensive, especially as compared with grains that are easily handled mechanically, but even compared with meat and dairy products from grain-fed livestock. One major consequence of this has been that people generally consume more grains, meat, and dairy products, and less fruit and vegetables than they once did, before the mechanization juggernaut got started and while vegetable gardens were still common.

So, by an altogether different measure, how healthy the average diet is, mechanization has been a disaster, so far. I say "so far" because the essential problem is that, so far, mechanization has favored crops consisting of hard, dry seeds, that are easily handled in bulk, making other crops needed for a balanced diet relatively less affordable. In happier economic times this would matter less, as people would simply pay the premium for a healthier diet, but the times being what they are people are scrimping however they can, including with the food they consume.

There are other ways of measuring productivity: energy use*, soil gain or loss*, water use and contamination*, and the degree to which a given practice denies space to native flora and habitat to native fauna. By any of these measures, conventional mechanization comes out looking at least shortsighted if not dimwitted.

*(per unit produced)

So is the answer to turn back the clock on agricultural technology, to replace the plow with the hoe and the drill with the planting stick? I'm not prepared to make that argument - although I've no doubt others would - aside from noting that gardens are a better use of many urban spaces than are lawns, and there is no further need for rural communities to supply cities with cheap labor, since those cities are already well supplied, and many rural areas suffer from depopulation.

Instead, my position is that we need to take mechanization to the next level, replacing dumb machines suited only to bulk operations with smart machines capable of performing well-informed, detailed manipulations, for example controlling weeds by selectively pulling them from the ground or pest caterpillars by picking them from plants (unless they've already been parasitized, as by wasps) rather than by applying poisons.

Given machinery with an adequate array of sensors and a sufficiently broad range of optional actions, applying best practices becomes a matter of mating these with processing power connected to an expert system, and of programming.

It gets better, because the same system that works the land can be used to improve the expert system through experimentation and, in routine operation, by accumulation of data to which statistical methods can be applied, and can also be used to improve the crops themselves, as for instance by leaving the best formed, most insect resistant cabbages to go to seed.

The bottom line is that this approach can make available the mechanical equivalent of an attentive expert gardener, at a cost, given predictable economies of scale, that would make possible the wholesale replacement of conventional, traction-based machinery and methods with more adaptable machinery bringing a whole new repertoire of methods to bear, one far better suited to the production of the fruits and vegetables that have been becoming unaffordable under the current regime.

As for the other measures of productivity mentioned above, such machinery, since it wouldn't need to turn soil in bulk and could operate long hours without continuous supervision, would consume energy at a relatively low rate, suitable for supply from solar panels or via the grid from renewable sources. It could operate through continuous ground cover, all but eliminating soil loss, and with minimal use or complete non-use of herbicides and pesticides, reducing soil and water contamination. Ground cover, mulch, and the humus accumulating from decaying roots can also reduce the need for irrigation, and the ability to create local varieties through seed selection based on the health of maturing plants can further reduce it, as well as helping to adapt more quickly to climate change. Making room for native species, something that can only be accomplished in conventional practice by leaving land completely undisturbed, becomes a matter of programming the system to leave certain species alone, wherever it finds them, even to the extent of tolerating some crop loss to native fauna, and to leave anything it can't identify alone until it can be identified.

Such machinery might not be able to compete with conventional practice in the production of corn and other bulk commodities, at least to start with, but it also wouldn't consume prodigious amounts of petroleum-based fuels. Moreover, development and rapid deployment of such machinery would drive the growth of a new, potentially domestic industry, one that would also work to the benefit of materials recycling efforts, more efficient transportation, and on and on.

The R-word I haven't yet mentioned is robotics. While such machines probably aren't what most people first think of when robots are mentioned, their creation and production falls squarely within the discipline of robotics, composed as they would necessarily be from robotic technologies.

monitoring fields with UAVs

2011-12-09T10:44:00.001-07:00

They're using radio-controlled aircraft rather than autonomous machines, but it's still a big improvement over the time spent walking fields or the lack of detail that comes from only checking the edges of a field. I expect further improvements with the introduction of better sensors and on-board controllers.

The Rambunctious Garden: Emma Marris

2011-11-26T09:26:00.001-07:00

Go check out this post about Emma Marris's Rambunctious Garden on my Cultibotics blog.

Microsplat: How Microsoft's business could collapse

2011-11-25T09:35:00.001-07:00

Business Insider has published an article, STEVE BALLMER'S NIGHTMARE: How Microsoft's Business Actually Could Collapse, outlining several mechanisms which could coincide to cause Microsoft's revenue stream to contract dramatically, likely Microsoft responses to these pressures, and alternative takes on the outcome.

alternatives to the current economic system, and constraints thereon

2011-10-29T19:33:00.001-06:00

Responding to a question posed on LinkedIn, "What's a better alternative to the current global economic system?"

I'm tempted to say no alternative is possible, by which I mean that only incremental change can happen. The system we have is both enormously complex and intolerant of wholesale meddling. In the unlikely chance some fundamentally different system could be agreed upon, with a switchover date, you'd have people dealing in futures based on how long it would be before the alternative would collapse and we'd be back to business as usual.

Even incremental change directed away from the essential nature of the system as it currently exists is quite difficult. The system serves the interests of those able to apply leverage, both economically and in the sphere of public opinion, and fighting this is roughly equivalent to swimming upstream. Nevertheless, there are some things that might be done.

The existence of a malnourished, hopeless underclass is in no one's interest. It saps the spirit of a society and creates an element of instability that occasionally erupts as mob violence. This problem could be eliminated overnight through a guaranteed minimum income, or the equivalent in subsidies for food, housing, clothing, health care, and connectivity, with bonuses for self-improvement, and only a fraction of a dollar taken away for each dollar earned. The cost of this would be relatively small, compared with other ways we spend our money, and also small compared with the consequences of the loss to the economy of so many consumers, whose purchases help drive demand and therefore the profitability of business, and in any case measures of equal scope will become necessary as automation further reduces the percentage of the population that need work to maintain a given standard of living for the society as a whole. Raise the standard of living, and that percentage comes back up, but with constraints; some may need to retrain for two or three years for every year their skills are marketable.

In a world where corporations and individual fortunes transcend national boundaries, but taxation doesn't (except as nations themselves are expected to contribute to international funds), there are many ways to escape paying taxes, and the responsibility to do so has fallen out of fashion. While at this moment it might seem politically unachievable, vesting the power of taxation in some world-wide entity that also transcends national boundaries would help level the playing field, and, for example, diminish the pressure on local authorities to provide incentives that undermine the value of new enterprises located in their districts, and to overlook abusive practices.

Corporate personhood is also due for reexamination. While some of the consequences of this legal fiction make sense to me, corporations having the rights and responsibilities of the ownership of land, buildings, and machines, for instance, others do not. Intellectual property is a gray area for me. On the one hand it makes sense that a corporation ought to derive preferential benefit from research it conducted in-house or funded, while on the other hand it makes sense that the overall benefit would be greater if that research had been conducted according to academic norms of openness, at public expense. I don't believe corporations should be allowed to intervene in any way in the political process, neither directly by officially supporting or opposing parties, candidates, or ballot issues, nor indirectly through PACs, nor by compensating employees or officers who do so on their own time and/or out of their personal funds. On the other hand, I don't believe in the taxation of corporate income. Real estate and other property, yes, even liquid assets, but not income. Taxation on income should be deferred until it becomes the income of some real person, whether through payroll, stock options, or dividends. Regarding taxation of funds earned abroad and repatriated, presumably they've already been taxed by the countries in which they were earned, so it makes sense that they should be taxed here at a reduced rate, if at all.

To some these will sound like radical suggestions. To others they will seem far too tame. Such is the way forward.

Apple has 1000 engineers working on chips

2011-10-09T19:56:00.001-06:00

According to TechCrunch, Apple has 1000 engineers doing silicon design.

replacing Steve Job's sense for what people will want

2011-10-08T11:36:00.001-06:00

Except for the small percentage of people with fluid imaginations, many of whom are borderline schizophrenic, people can't know what they want until they've seen it, or at least heard it described, or better yet tried it out for themselves. The ability to predict what people would want, and be willing to pay for, was no small part of Steve Jobs's genius, and, in the absence of another individual with that same gift, Apple will need a process that can produce results at least nearly as accurate as Steve's intuition did.

I think Apple has all of the elements from which to build such a process already, and only needs to connect them together. Their engineering and design operations already work closely together, each contributing new ideas. To this they only need to add retail; that's right, the stores, hundreds of them, with personnel in constant contact with Apple's customers.

They can't, of course, send product designs out for retail employees to show to customers. Not only would that approach completely negate the secrecy aspect of the company's culture (largely responsible for its mystique), but the feedback it yielded would be almost worthless.

Instead, they need to simply listen, when customers describe features they'd like to see implemented or products they'd like to see built, and pass along what they hear to a group back at Apple HQ, created for that purpose and closely connected to both engineering and design. That group would sift through the suggestions, recombine them, and pass along the most promising of them to product development managers, who might either initiate official projects or authorize skunkwork projects, depending on how close the idea was to describing a marketable product, meaning one that could be built economically enough using available technology to sell briskly at a customary markup.

Even better would be a structure wherein both design and engineering had representatives in the stores, design representatives on the floor and engineering representatives behind the genius bar. These would probably be retail personnel with special training, who would be called over to listen to customers's ideas while other personnel went on with the ordinary business of the store, and these special representatives in the stores could constitute the pool from which the group doing the sifting back at HQ was drawn, providing not only an advancement path (other than management) for retail but a section of the company which, properly led, would gradually become expert at identifying and describing potential products.

It's probably not necessary to have a pair of such representatives at every store, perhaps only 10%. If you think in terms of the adage about saying "no" to 1000 things to find the one thing worth doing, and expect that each such representative will glean an average of one reasonable idea per week, then 100 such representatives should produce one really good idea, worth pursuing, every 10 weeks or so, or about 5 per year. That might seem like a lot of wheelspinning to get a few good ideas, but good ideas are what keeps a company like Apple healthy, and just one blockbuster product would pay for many years of this approach. Moreover, in the meantime, there'd be thousands of customers who left the store feeling as though someone had really listened to them.

gone too soon, but still not done

2011-10-07T10:22:00.001-06:00

Just over a month ago, I wrote (paraphrased) it was inconceivable that Steve Jobs was done. While fate has since robbed him of the pleasure of carrying out his plans personally, that he had plans for the future is certain (corroborated by Eric Schmidt), and that he was well aware he might not be around to see them through is just as certain. Some such plan may be laid out in his will, and there may be some hint of it in his official biography, but given his belief in the necessity of secrecy it's unlikely that the whole plan can be found in any combination of public sources.

That he had the means available to set something significant in motion is also certain, between his personal wealth and the array of people with whom he had strong personal connections. That he had the vision to do so should be apparent from his record at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar.

It's also likely that his plans don't particularly revolve around Apple, not because he'd run out of ideas for the company, but because it became necessary to turn over control of the company to others, and apart from perpetuating the culture that made the company so successful in the first place, he wouldn't want to constrain their freedom to respond to evolving technology and market conditions. Also, his $6 Billion would scarcely make a dent in the prospects for Apple, paling as it does in comparison with the company's cash reserves, but turned in some other direction it could make a huge difference, invested carefully, and still secure the financial future of his family.

So, while I can barely finish writing this through the tears, I'm still expecting something insanely great from the mind of Steve Jobs, perhaps even something that will capture the imagination of millions and change the world more profoundly than anything he lived to carry through himself.

These grievances are not all-inclusive.

2011-10-02T21:14:00.001-06:00

The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City (as edited on 10/1/11) appears below without comment.

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

THIS DOCUMENT WAS ACCEPTED BY THE NYC GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

monitors that aren't also computers, an endangered species

2011-09-28T13:03:00.001-06:00

In an article titled Apple Thunderbolt Display teardown: So many chips it’s hard to believe there’s no computer inside 9to5mac passes along this observation:

iFixit says that both sides of the logic board are packed with so many chips “that it’s hard to believe there’s no computer inside”.

Considering that we've arguably already arrived at the point of saturation, with regard to incremental improvements in computational power producing noticeable improvements in the user experience on displays the size of the Thunderbolt Display, making use of high-end CPUs and GPUs not constrained by power dissipation, and given the inexorable migration of the performance of such high-end chips to low-power, low-cost, highly integrated chips of the sort found in the iPad, how long will it be before it simply makes no sense to build something as complex as the Thunderbolt Display without also making it a computer in its own right? Five years? Ten? (The same logic could be applied to TV tuner hardware.)

HP needs to rediscover its roots

2011-09-24T13:17:00.001-06:00

John Dvorak says Meg Whitman will get nowhere as CEO of HP, and won't last two years in the position.

IMHO, HP needs someone who remembers what HP's strengths once were, when it had some, someone with the patience to attend to detail, someone like my sister-in-law. Let's just call her J.

J worked in inventory control at an HP facility not located in Silicon Valley. By the time she retired, she knew just about all there was to know about inventory control and the software used to manage it. (Not her bragging, but me recognizing the ring of sterling competence on the rare occasion she talks about the work she used to do.)

No, she doesn't know all there is to know about running a company, but she's sensible and, outside of her kitchen, knows how to delegate responsibility. What's more, I'd be willing to bet she'd come out of retirement for a fraction of what they're paying Ms. Whitman.

something from The Wayback Machine

2011-09-24T11:27:00.001-06:00

The year was 1997, but what Steve Jobs had to say sounds like it might have been written in 2011… (see video)

"time's up, pencils down"

2011-09-22T10:04:00.001-06:00

Ever wonder how John Gruber got to be as popular a pundit as he's become? His Sept. 21st piece about Apple's fall event, which has in previous years been about music, their iTunes Store and software, and iPods, is a case in point. It's a combination of reasonably good command of the language, plain old common sense, and a light touch of humor, in addition to the occasional tip from an inside source. He's not afraid to admit when he's posting sheer speculation and has a pretty good batting average, but mainly he lays out his reasoning for anyone to inspect who cares to go to the trouble. Agree with him or not, you have to respect his approach.

Hoffa suffers brain malfunction

2011-09-07T10:29:00.001-06:00

As reported by 9to5Mac, Jim Hoffa, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union, in an interview on State of the Union, has characterized Apple, Inc. as being unpatriotic, saying:

“Look at Apple, they have $76 billion dollars in their checking account, and they’re not spending it… instead of investing here, everything they do is in China, or in Asia somewhere… There’s something wrong with that.”

He might do better to ask what the institutions in which it is invested are doing with Apple's money, since it's certainly the case that they haven't stuffed it into a mattress.

larger touch screen devices from Apple

2011-09-05T23:50:00.001-06:00

The Unofficial Apple Weblog sometimes combines a poll with comments, which, given the nature of their readership, can produce interesting results. Earlier today, Erica Sadun began one such combination, titled You're the Pundit: Will iOS and OS X merge?. Now she has followed that with another, titled You're the Pundit: Are we going to see a touch iMac? Since my AIM password seems not to be working, here is what I'd intended to post there.

By the time the iPhone SDK was released, I had an idea for an app, but it wasn't until the iPad came along, with it's larger screen, that I was able to produce something publishable, and I still felt hemmed in. The full-blown app I have in mind really needs at least a 20-inch screen, and 27 inches would be better, but that screen still needs to be responsive to touch. At such screen sizes, a touch-based operating system that doesn't make allowance for moving on-screen objects around arbitrarily, as on a desktop, and by doing so cause them to perform actions, interact, or be acted upon, will probably seem quaint and hamstrung. Since I fully expect Apple will eventually produce larger touch screen devices, it seems likely that we haven't yet seen all of what they have planned for such an environment, much less all of what they have in mind for gestural computing in general. There may even be a place for windows on larger touch screen devices, but OS X's windowing system would need significant reworking, and I'd expect any window-related APIs to bear the "UI" prefix, so the OS is likely to be called "iOS", even though it will have drawn further inspiration from Mac OS and provide a user experience that's closer to Mac OS than what other iOS devices do. Hopefully, they will come with front-facing stereo cameras, for tracking gestures not involving touching the screen.

what Steve Jobs has yet to do

2011-08-27T09:47:00.001-06:00

Certainly, Steve Jobs could sit on his hands, attend board meetings, show up at the Apple campus occasionally, and otherwise do nothing, for as long as life and breath remain to him. He could, that is, if he were someone else.

But don't expect more of the same from him; others are quite capable of carrying Apple's products and services forward, and Steve's time is too precious for him to be spending it on what others can do (except as he might find dabbling therapeutic).

With unique abilities come unique responsibility, and Steve's abilities are at least a rare combination, if not altogether unique, and are amplified by the tremendous resources his past successes have placed within his reach.

Moreover, he commands the attention of millions; even his offhand remarks are routinely widely distributed.

From where I sit, there's no telling what he will choose to do with all this, but I'm anticipating something insanely great!

the importance of robotics to the achievement of sustainability

2011-08-15T10:37:00.001-06:00

I firmly believe that (short of convincing the vast majority of people to return to subsistence farming, something which could only be accomplished through intense coercion) robotics is vitally important to achieving sustainability. This belief so permeates my thinking that it seems necessary to state it explicitly.

I won't be making any arguments in support of this belief today, but just wanted to get it out there, plainly stated.

a sleeping dog and a bush

2011-08-10T09:36:00.001-06:00

In describing the current state of military robotics, IEEE Spectrum says...

Some of the DOD's most advanced UAVs carry dozens of sensors, including high-resolution night-vision cameras, 3-D imagers, and acoustic arrays. Yet most cannot distinguish a sleeping dog from a bush, even at high noon.

We humans, as participants in the larger economic, social, and political currents of our time, suffer from similar perceptual inadequacy. Many of us fail to understand which among the presumptive alternatives (parties and candidates) comes closest to knowing the way to a better future and intending to lead us there.

More of us fail to comprehend, or forget, that it's up to us, both individually and collectively, to help make that better future possible. Even with the most enlightened of leaders in power, it isn't enough to support that leader's agenda, since such agendas inevitably become bogged down in the struggle to rise above the muck of long-since co-opted politics, forced to compromise away much or most of the content that made them worth supporting in the first place.

But just because compromise is inevitable doesn't mean that we should therefore point to the shadow and call it the light. Our struggle is with those who would, if allowed, take us back to a feudal society, divided between aristocrats and serfs, or something very like it. Not only do they seek to reinstitute classist society, but their effort to do so distracts us from other matters, such as climate change, pollution, the loss of farmland to spreading cities, and the loss of soil to erosion.

We have no choice but to fight both wars at once, to put the devil of aristocracy back into chains and to remake our material culture into something sustainable, able to continue on indefinitely without fouling the planet we all depend upon.

this is my next dot com

2011-07-16T20:16:00.001-06:00

I really don't have much to say about ThisIsMyNext.com, other than go check it out.

The people behind it are mainly former usual suspects from Engadget, although that's quickly becoming less true as they add new staff. "This is my next ..." is actually a placeholder name for whatever this conglomeration of talent, emotional entanglement, and momentum eventually evolves into.

The most interesting aspect of ThisIsMyNext, as it currently exists, is the weekly podcast, usually produced on Thursdays and available from the website the following morning, and from iTunes sometime after that. It's mainly about mobile devices platforms (iOS, Android, WebOS, etc.) and specific smart phones and tablets, and they tend to avoid talking about Apple too much.

Frankly, except for iOS and except for the implications of Android for robotics, I find it hard to care about the subject of their discussions, but I still love listening. They know what they're talking about, even when they don't agree, and they know each other well enough to be fluid and engaging in the way they go about it.

I wish the same could be said about Congress.

is Martin Ford right enough? does it matter?

2011-06-29T10:37:00.001-06:00

In evaluating Martin Ford's thesis in The Lights in the Tunnel, the question isn't whether he's entirely right. Rather, to have no point he must be entirely wrong, otherwise the danger remains that he might be right enough, that the process he outlines might in fact result in economic collapse due to a collapse of effective demand (demand combined with purchasing power), brought about by a too many jobs being taken away by automation.

On the other hand, does it really matter, given an economy that seems to depend, for its long-term health, on an infinite supply of land, water, raw materials, and labor (or its mechanical substitute), an infinite market, and an infinite landfill, none of which actually exist? If the collapse of demand doesn't bring it down, something else will.

The need to fundamentally restructure our economic arrangements is looming and unavoidable.

Moreover, by reducing the need for anyone to engage in dangerous or demeaning work, robotics may actually make this transformation easier.

augmentation: the other side of the robotics coin

2011-06-19T11:20:00.001-06:00

Toward the end of the first installment of my response to Martin Ford's The Lights in the Tunnel I said the following:

just as technology enables automation, it also enables augmentation - strength amplification, protection against environmental hazards, heads-up displays providing just-in-time information, enhanced senses, precise manipulation, eye tracking, voice recognition and synthesis, etc. - making what the average human worker is able to perform a moving target

Under pressure from the growing complexity of the aircraft it produces, Boeing has been a pioneer in using virtual reality overlays to provide people possessing general skills with the specific technical information needed to perform the tasks at hand, making it unnecessary for workers to be experts on the systems they build or maintain. That expert knowledge is maintained in a database and served to the worker just when it's needed. (Such an approach could also enable farmers to maintain robotic machinery with which they had no prior experience.)

DARPA has demonstrated keen interest in providing soldiers with wearable equipment that can enhance their strength and stamina, allowing them to carry more weight further, faster, over terrain too difficult for wheeled vehicles. They have also funded fully robotic solutions, but so far that augmentative approach looks more promising.

These examples combine nicely. A factory or maintenance facility worker with a powersuit would be able to handle heavier parts without the need for hoists, and a soldier with a heads-up display would be less likely to get lost, or to waste time and effort on inefficient paths.

Telepresence and teleoperation make it possible for human workers to be on the scene, instantly, when needed. Using the example of an automated transportation system this could mean welcoming passengers and verifying that they and their belongings are entirely inside the vehicle before closing the door, ascertaining a destination, operating active components to secure assistive devices, checking whether problems develop en route, insuring passenger security at the destination before opening the door, checking whether the vehicle needs to be cleaned or repaired before being used again, and actually directing the vehicle anywhere it needed to go outside of the track/guideway system, with the aid of onboard sensors and intelligence. For each of these functions there might be an automatic mode, with a human operator monitoring in questionable circumstances and intervening whenever the automatic mode proved inadequate, when experience suggested that it would be likely to do so, or when a particular passenger had indicated a preference for dealing with a human operator and time permitted.

When a human is part of the solution, you get a highly evolved brain and basic senses in the bargain. Ford makes the point that, for many jobs, what a human brings to the table is more than is needed, and that providing technical analogs for just the portion that is needed is commonly either already possible or within reach. While I grant the truth of this, I also want to point out that within reach and affordable are far from being the same thing, and that just because you can replace a person with a machine in a particular circumstance doesn't mean that doing so constitutes a reasonable business decision. Moreoever, the 'excess' capacity of a human worker may be just what's needed to prevent an anomalous situation from turning into a disaster, saving the company far more than the difference between wages and benefits and the cost of ownership and operation of some replacement machine.

Because technical augmentation tends to move human workers from mind-numbing work into positions where they are both more stimulated and have a higher level view of the overall operation, it also pays off in terms of developing experience in those workers as individuals and in the workforce as a whole.

Aside from the simplest repetitive tasks, the return on the investment dollar for technology to enhance a human worker's capabilities is very likely to be both greater and more immediate than the return on investment for the more sophisticated technology needed to actually replace that worker.

where businesses are putting their money

2011-06-15T00:06:00.001-06:00

The post Man vs. Machine on the NYTimes blog Economix is closely related to my ongoing discussion of Martin Ford's The Lights in the Tunnel, and lends support to his contention that economists are wrong in their off-handed dismissal of the possibility that automation/AI/robotics may produce permanently high unemployment, resulting in the collapse of the economy, unless something is done to preserve consumer spending power despite unemployment.

The comparison between change in spending on equipment and software versus change in spending on payroll and benefits is particularly telling. Employee compensation is growing, but at about one tenth the pace.

agricultural robotics and employment

2011-06-12T18:02:00.001-06:00

At least with regard to agriculture, the effect of robotics upon employment depends on the approach taken. If your goal is to further reduce the number of people deriving an income from farming, and you are willing to accept any other sort of expense to that end (autonomous tractors for instance), then you can probably manage to reduce the percentage of the workforce engaged in agricultural production to an even smaller fraction of 1%.

If your goal is to maximize the production of those crops that are easily produced and handled in bulk and survive long-term storage well, in the interest of generating return on capital investment and foreign exchange, and only care about how it's done insofar as that impacts the bottom line, you might conclude that capital expenditures to further minimize payroll would generally not be cost effective, that it would cost more to replace the remaining workforce than to keep it.

However, if you're interested in guaranteeing the sustainability of production far into the future, despite climate change, while also halting soil loss, ending the use of poisons, preserving remaining diversity in both crop and native genomes, and rebalancing production for healthier diets, you may need both more sophisticated machinery and all the people you can recruit.

Such a complicated goal implies complex operations, and complex operations imply a large variety of tasks, some easily mechanized and others common enough to make mechanization worthwhile, even though challenging. Those that are neither common nor easily mechanized will fall to human workers, farmers and farmhands, who are far more adaptable than any machine.

At some point in the future it may become possible to build machines adaptable enough to take the place of a farmer, but until the annual cost of ownership of such a machine drops below the annual cost of one human worker, it won't make economic sense to deploy them, and without an infrastructure to drive down the cost of robotics, that may never happen.

Cross-posted from my Cultibotics blog.

Ford's Lights in the Tunnel, early quibbles

2011-05-30T10:33:00.001-06:00

I haven't read far enough through the book yet to know whether Ford actually stands behind these positions, or has simply propped them up as straw men.

In the Introduction, on page 5, he writes The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 demonstrated quite conclusively that there is no good alternative to the free market system. Perhaps he was attempting to ingratiate himself to economists in saying this, or attempting to preempt argument based on the soviet example, or maybe he truly believes it. Whatever his purpose, the statement by itself is a blatant non sequitur. The Soviet Union was a single example of an alternative, or maybe a class of alternative examples, since they tried just about every permutation of their own model at one time or another (some of which worked rather well in microeconomic terms, by the way). But their ideology-driven model severely constrained what experiments were possible and even more so which could be given sufficient latitude for a fair test.

Then, in Chapter 1, in the Automation Comes to the Tunnel thought experiment beginning on page 17, he discusses temporarily increased profits deriving from reduced costs made possible by automation, but he completely neglects the secondary effect of growth and jobs created in the automation/robotics industry, in design, customization, testing, sales, production, shipping, installation, maintenance, programming, and retooling. These may not add up to the jobs replaced by machines in other industries, but it's too large a factor to be ignored.

Now, back to the Introduction, page 2, for a consideration of the following. Put yourself in the position of a business owner and think of all the problems that are associated with human employees: vacation, safety rules, sick time, payroll taxes, poor performance...maternity leave. If an affordable machine can do nearly any routine job as well as a human worker, then what business manager in his or her right mind would hire a worker? This turns on the word affordable which at best comes down to a projection, made by a CFO, based on incomplete information, regarding whether the business will profit more from keeping its workers or from replacing some of them with machines, and it's not as simple as comparing the cost of a machine with the annual cost of the workers it could replace multiplied by the machine's estimated useful life. People are more adaptable, and can move from one task to another with a minimum of fuss, whereas a machine would at least need to be reprogrammed (or retrained) for each new task, and might even prove useless in the new circumstances; the more specialized the machine the less likely it is to be able to adapt. Also, just as technology enables automation, it also enables augmentation - strength amplification, protection against environmental hazards, heads-up displays providing just-in-time information, enhanced senses, precise manipulation, eye tracking, voice recognition and synthesis, etc. - making what the average human worker is able to perform a moving target.

The situation would seem to be less bleak than Ford's first pass through the tunnel suggests.

wishing for the Janus (times 2 or 3) online locus

2011-05-29T12:32:00.001-06:00

I've recently been making more use of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, somewhat at the expense of participation on The WELL, but not entirely so. Each of these has something to offer, and leaves something to be wished for. I've also ramped up my use of RSS (until I became overwhelmed and had to shut it back down), and have three blogs (including this one), a couple of homepages, one dormant, and a couple of dormant domain names.

The blogs are all on Google's Blogger, so that's a single identity, and the active homepage is on The WELL, so that combines with my participation there to form another identity. RSS, the dormant homepage, and the domain names don't really count, for now, but that still leaves me with FIVE online identities, without including accounts on the systems of companies with which I do business.

Meanwhile there's a herd of other social networking sites wanting a piece of that pie, and more joining the melee all the time. It leaves me wondering what they could possibly be thinking, given the time and mental effort participants in existing sites have already invested, and amazed at the numbers reported by the more successful of the newcomers.

But I don't want more places to spread myself across. I want a single service that allows me to present my various aspects as parts of a single whole, allowing me to selectively expose some or all on a per-contact or per-group basis, and which allows me to make finer distinctions regarding sources of input than follow, like, or connect.

As for RSS, it's not the particular feed but the entity behind it, the specific organization, program, university department, startup company, or corporation, that I'm interested in and want to track. Not all of these publish the news I'd like to know about as RSS feeds; some publish press releases to mailing lists, and some merely update their websites. Some even publish news as YouTube videos. I'd like to be able to combine all such sources into a single interface, keeping the extraneous noise to a bare minimum.

So, while new systems competing for your attention, bringing new themes and new variations on the old ones, may help to build out the possibilities of online networking and information distribution, I look forward to the day when these upstarts have combined to form a smaller number of more complete systems, been acquired, or themselves swallowed one of the whales of social networking.

PS, I completely forgot about my Yahoo!/Flickr account, which adds two Yahoo! groups and a Flickr photostream, and a sixth online identity!

confidence is a perishable commodity

2011-05-25T10:21:00.001-06:00

Lodsys had best bite their tounges, before they inflict demonstrable damage on the perishable commodity that is the confidence of Apple's developers. Otherwise they may find their patents are worth less than the damage they've done, and are therefore forfeit.

in search of the way forward

2011-05-22T18:06:00.001-06:00

An old acquaintance suggested I check out Martin Ford's "The Lights in the Tunnel" which I'm in the process of doing.

The fast, first-pass take is a little scary. It seems to be about how the economy is falling apart because too many people have no purchasing power, because their jobs have been shipped offshore, automated, or both.

Ford has some suggestions about how to deal with this and I've had some thoughts along these lines myself, so I anticipate using his writings to reenergize and hone my own thinking and sharing the result of that process here.

One tentative conclusion I'd reached just shortly before hearing about "The Lights in the Tunnel" was that, generally speaking, when robotics is applied to bringing a better approach to bear to some task (doing things in progressively greater detail, taking more and more into account) the result is usually a net gain in employment. I'm not sure this is generally true, but I'm nearly certain it's true in circumstances where people have already been all but completely replaced by machines, such as is the case in modern agriculture, where humans have mostly been relegated to the role of machine operator, serving as the control unit that it hadn't until quite recently been possible to build.

The application of robotics to the conduct of horticulture on an agricultural scale is a longtime theme for me; I have another blog on that subject, so chances are I'll be returning to that example from time to time, but, as Ford is at some pains to point out, this is an issue which transcends any category of economic activity.

It is clear at the outset that it is the inertia of our socioeconomic arrangements that threatens a crisis in response to the liberation being made possible by emerging technologies, and, with another set of such arrangements we don't yet know to name, we might welcome that liberation as a godsend.

More to follow...

in garb appropriate to the slaying of trolls

2011-05-21T11:16:00.001-06:00

I just had a humorous thought. When WWDC 2011 rolls around, a little over two weeks from now, Steve Jobs takes the stage in full armor and carrying a great sword (all fashioned from aluminum for the occasion), which is to say in garb appropriate to the slaying of trolls.

Alan Winfield on ethics for roboticists

2011-05-08T10:13:00.001-06:00

Writing in parallel with an article appearing in NewScientist, Alan Winfield provides a summary of the work-in-progress outcome of a workshop on ethics for roboticists which took place last year.

plea to GOP

2011-05-01T19:04:00.001-06:00

Please, please, give us a presidential candidate whose candidacy can be conducive to constructive debate.

In case you're wondering, IMHO that would exclude Donald Trump.

FCC Chairman Genachomski Interviewed by TechCrunch

2011-04-20T09:13:00.001-06:00

TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid talks with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. If you want to know what drove the creation of the rules currently being batted around by Congress, watch this video.

Kodak may be in for a surprise

2011-03-26T19:36:00.001-06:00

Kodak is saying that, should Apple and RIM fail to settle, they may be liable for $1 Billion.

Kodak's market cap is slightly lower than that.

Why should Apple and RIM fork out $1 Billion in damages when they could buy the company for about the same amount?

Scoble Tours SRI and Gets Scoop on Siri

2011-03-07T21:50:00.004-07:00

Robert Scoble, a frequent contributor to Rackspace's Building 43 recently toured SRI and conducted interviews with senior staff. Videos of those interviews have just been published on TechCrunch. A related, long inteview, about the spin-off and subsequent acquisition by Apple of Siri, creators of the iPhone app by the same name — with Norman D. Winarsky, Vice President of Ventures, Licensing and Strategic Programs at SRI, Gary J. Morgenthaler, General Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, and Shawn T. Carolan, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures — is linked from the TechCrunch article in two parts (Part I, Part II). There is a notable quote in Part II (beginning at 8min 30sec): Think of the world's best AI technology in the hands of the world's greatest consumer electronics company. While the AI technology Apple acquired with Siri may represent a competitive advantage, it also represents the state of the art, and suggests that AI of the sort used by Siri is ready for prime time.

TED talk by MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty

2011-02-25T14:32:00.001-07:00

Lion Server to be integrated (included) with Lion

2011-02-24T09:52:00.001-07:00

Apple frequently opts for non-alternatives, that is for options the pundits hadn't even considered.

Such is the case with the inclusion of Lion Server in every copy of Lion! Just for starters, this means that every Mac running Lion will put Wiki Server at the user's fingertips, and very likely make the code behind it available to developers.

Just how much of the current, distinct server version will carry over to be included with Lion remains to be seen. Apple may decide to put some components representing large investments on the App Store, but they'll run on the stock version of Lion and be a cinch to install.

I can just see the ad now, Mac OS X Lion, the world's most complete operating system.

IBM, the button-down revolutionary

2011-01-23T19:55:00.001-07:00

Lest we take them for granted...

replacing the iTunes app with a web app

2011-01-18T11:53:00.001-07:00

9to5mac reports rumors that Apple plans to replace the iTunes app with a Safari-only web app.

Before commenting on how credible this might be, let me suggest a little experiment. Fire up iTunes and point it to the iPhone/iPod/iPad app store, also fire up the Mac app store application, then do a few parallel searches for apps that exist on both platforms. Note how the performance of the iTunes app compares with that of the Mac app store application.

Apple has been building out a web version of iTunes for some time. Take the Twitter app, for instance. If you search for Twitter, in the iOS app store using the iTunes app, and click on the bird, nothing will happen because you're already there, but if you right-click (control-click) on the bird and choose copy link, then paste that link into Safari and activate it, instead of being taken back to the iTunes app you're instead taken to a look-alike web page.

Given that Apple has a contractual obligation to constrain the installation of non-free apps to devices owned by people who've paid for those apps, it makes sense that they would limit access to a web version of the iTunes store to Safari, which they can control, possibly using a plug-in for this purpose. They might also use Safari only to conduct transactions with the store and use a separate program to manage the configuration of various devices.

Whatever the details, there's probably some truth to this rumor.

what I'm talking about

2011-01-14T11:07:00.001-07:00

After years of anticipation, here it is, the brush you can use to paint on a screen!

Now, imagine using one of these on a screen that has touch sensitivity in each and every pixel, instead of the currently lower-resolution grid!

iRobot's AVA uses iPad for controller and telepresence interface

2011-01-09T20:24:00.001-07:00

If you can program an iPad (or Android tablet) you can program iRobot's AVA.

Engadget originally characterized AVA as a telepresence machine, using an iPad sitting on a mount that incorporates a camera as the interface, but the AVA will be a general purpose platform complete with SDK, which, for the iPad, will be compatible with Xcode and the iOS SDK.

Great move, iRobot!

if you've already paid for Pixelmator, buy it again now!

2011-01-08T11:24:00.001-07:00

If you have Pixelmator 1.6.3 installed on your Mac, don't be fooled if running "Check Now" in Preferences => Updates tells you that you are running the latest version. 1.6.4 is waiting for you on the Mac App Store!

What? Pay for it again? Well, as an email sent to licensed users says "You can download Pixelmator on the Mac App Store for just $29, for a limited time. By transitioning to the Mac App Store, you will get the totally awesome Pixelmator 2.0 (and, of course, still lots of 1.X updates) for free once it is out in the Mac App Store later this year."

So think of it as a prepaid upgrade. True, those who hadn't yet paid for the program will get the same deal, but at least they'll be joining you in helping to underwrite one of the finer pieces of software in existence.

If you wait, the price will go up, so act now.

24 hours and a million downloads later

2011-01-07T10:44:00.001-07:00

One of the most interesting aspects of the Mac App Store is how smoothly the application used to access it works. My guess is that it's based on WebKit and that the store itself uses SproutCore or something like it. In any event, it's a considerably more pleasant experience than using the iTunes app to access the iOS app store.

Should help sales!

what I'm talking about

2011-01-04T10:48:00.001-07:00

In a previous post I discussed the possibility of using an iPad as a Mac peripheral, and stated that I believed there were already iPad apps which made this possible, speculating that they probably paired with specific Mac apps.

Now, Macworld has found one that augments the Mac's Finder. Remote Conductor comes in two parts, the iPad app and a free Mac server application with which the iPad app cooperates, communicating via wifi. With this setup established, Remote Conductor offers three modes, one which turns the iPad into a large, multitouch trackpad, another which turns it into something resembling a grid display of your Applications folder from the Dock, and the third allows you to navigate through open windows by application (scrolling left/right) and by open windows belonging to an application (scrolling up/down).

I didn't see a price listed anywhere on the company's website, but a quick trip to the App Store shows that it sells for $9.99, which is a little steep, unless you'll be using it a lot, which, if it works as advertised, I'm sure many will. (Oh, and they're working on a Windows version of the server software.)

Very interesting, but not quite what I was talking about. What I'd really like to see would be a more general iPad app (or mode) that works with either a server or, preferably, with any app that includes and makes use of a framework for remotely controlling the iPad's display and directing input received from it. This is the easier option from a developer's standpoint, since making use of a separate server program would involve making use of services it presented by sending script-level messages to it, much as Automator does, something fewer developers know how to do.

Even better would be to do both. Since at least a minimal server process would be necessary, it might as well be owned by the operating system, and present applications with a choice of either passing low level data, generated by and targeted to code compiled using a framework designed for this purpose, or else interacting with the iPad via scripting. Those scripting hooks could actually be included in Automator, making them accessible to a much larger audience.

For security reasons, the part of this combo running on the iPad should be sandboxed at least to the same extent as other iPad apps, so that it had no more access than they do to data stored on the iPad. Because Mac apps aren't necessarily subjected to review, it might be better if it were even more isolated, as a service provided by iOS running in a special, locked-down mode. It could be enabled via a second button, like the one on the lock screen that puts the iPad into slideshow mode, and interrupted at any time by pressing the Home button (or as determined in Settings).

However the implementation were to be handled, the end result should be to make it possible for a Mac app to run part of itself on an iPad, taking advantage of not only the iPad's touchscreen but also the lion's share of its cpu/gpu time and RAM, as as much nonvolatile memory as any app is allowed, with Mac UI elements compiled using AppKit and iPad UI elements compiled using UIKit.

Unless and until Apple decides to make such a framework (and/or script server) available, it's still possible, right now, to create iOS apps which communicate and cooperate with Mac (Windows, etc.) applications, providing those applications with what amounts to a smart touchscreen peripheral.

If you're having trouble imagining how this might be useful, imagine an emergency call center with a highly integrated computing environment, with operators sitting at workstations and the shift supervisor walking around behind them carrying an iPad that's displaying an overview of all the traffic passing through the call center, with additional information (the history of calls from a particular number) just a quick tap away.

here comes the Mac App Store

2011-01-02T11:01:00.001-07:00

Opening January 6th.

I might have added "finally" or "at long last" to the title.

Sure, it's an idea that would have been very difficult to implement well just a few short years ago, before the iOS app store illuminated the territory, and in that sense its arrival is timely, but it fills a niche which has lain empty, potential yet gnawingly empty, at least since the ascendancy of the Internet. (There have been attempts to create a common marketplace for Mac apps, but all have fallen far short of what only Apple was ever in a position to do right, by integrating it into the system software.)

For the independent software developer, it's a godsend! Suddenly they'll have the means to make their wares widely available with little effort beyond that involved in crafting them well in the first place, and with little friction to prevent customers from making the decision to buy.

For users it's an answer to prayer! As the vendors of the third-party programs they use move (or expand) their distribution into the Mac App Store, users will gain a one-stop shop for updates. They'll also gain a simple, trustworthy process for buying new apps, and no more need to assume whatever risk there might be in using PayPal or other, similar services, and Apple's review process will help protect them from malware and poorly written programs.

Most likely, the stated price of apps (not what you can get in bargain basement combo deals) will come down on average, and, between the convenience and safety of the store itself and the better prices, the market will respond with an abrupt increase in sales volume. With a larger market, more effort will be devoted to developing Mac apps, and those apps will, for the most part, be gathered together in one place where the customer can browse through them looking for a best fit for their circumstances. Everbody wins!

What a heartening development!

Apple in 2011 and beyond

2011-01-01T13:55:00.001-07:00

Jonny Evans, writing in his Computerworld blog, has already issued his speculations for what might be forthcoming from Apple during 2011. I won't be going through that list, just pointing you to it.

The way I see it, there's several major trends to be tracked in news from Apple: the development of iOS, Mac OS X, and the cross-fertilization between them; the parallel development of iDevice and Mac hardware; the movement towards cloud computing; and any indication that Apple is transitioning towards increased self-reliance with regard to essential components. There's also the collection of secondary devices and peripherals, which may take on greater importance in the future as it becomes possible to shoehorn a complete system into smaller and smaller boxes.

Of these, I only intend to address Apple's movement towards self-reliance in essential components, branching out some from that starting point.

First, I don't mean to suggest that Apple is about to build or acquire an IC foundry, except perhaps a small-scale one sufficient to allow them to keep their IC designs in-house until ready for mass production. As the scale of circuit features has diminished, the cost of the equipment needed to fabricate chips has gone through the roof, and only very large scale operations are economically viable. This means a handful of foundry operators selling production line time, and that situation isn't likely to change soon. If Apple were to build or acquire a foundry, they would have to farm out production time when their own needs were slack, and buy additional production time from others when demand for their products grew faster than expected, meaning that it would be at best a marginal advantage and probably not enough of an advantage to justify the investment.

The tools for chip design, on the other hand, have become more affordable, and a cottage industry of small design houses has blossomed as a result. Many of these companies are involved in producing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), frequently combining only a small amount of custom circuitry with cores and subsystems licensed from others.

Apple has long been in the ASIC design business, incorporating custom chips into their product designs, but they have recently been bolstering this capability, in part through the acquisitions of Palo Alto Semiconductor and Intrinsity, and, at least for iOS devices, they have moved to custom CPU designs incorporating ARM cores. We can expect more of this, and it wouldn't be terribly surprising if the MacBook Air were to be switched to an ARM-based design.

Apple already has the technology to cross-compile software between CPU instruction sets, having done this first for MC68000 code running on PPC machines, and then for PPC code on Intel machines. Moreover, in the transition from PPC to Intel, they did some work on using an intermediate instruction set for an abstract virtual machine as part of process of translating code from one platform to another, and they have continued as an active participant in the LLVM project, incorporating that technology into Xcode.

That doesn't necessarily means they could deploy an ARM-based machine running Mac OS X tomorrow, but chances are they've been working quietly on exactly that; the writing having been on the wall since they determined that the Intel Atom wasn't competitive for use in portable devices. And, while they could use an off-the-shelf CPU in such a machine, it's nearly certain they'll instead opt for an in-house custom design. This would allow them to, for example, incorporate a graphics core that's optimized for both OpenGL and OpenCL. (They might even bring back the Velocity Engine, in a fresh, multicore implementation.)

But an ARM-based MacBook Air shouldn't be taken as an indication that Apple was about to abandon Intel's processors. While the low-end (plastic) MacBook might also make the switch, it's unlikely that the MacBook Pro line would follow, at least not immediately, and even less likely that the desktop line would drop Intel. Apple has long upheld the principle that software should be hardware-independent, both allowing maximum flexibility in the selection of hardware and helping to insure that changes in the hardware don't break the software. Simultaneously shipping ARM-based light-weight portables and Intel-based desktop and professional machines - that run the same software without the need for fat binaries, because it's all compiled for the LLVM virtual machine - would drive that point home.

So, three predictions: first, expect Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to have a legacy environment, for software that assumes the Intel CPU architecture, and a native mode for software that's been (re)compiled with the LLVM virtual machine as the target architecture; second, expect the Mac App store to cease accepting new Intel binaries within a year of the release of Lion, perhaps as little as six months; and third, expect an LLVM-binary compatibility environment in Snow Leopard before they cease revising it (analogous to the inclusion of Carbon in Mac OS 8 and 9).

Back to you, Jonny.

branching states

2010-12-26T23:00:00.001-07:00

"State" here refers to a snapshot view of what's going on in a complex dynamic system.

A branching state is one that can go two or more different ways, which is to say one for which subsequent states are not just unpredictable but intrinsically indeterminate. There is a trivial sense in which this is always true, due to the impossibility of knowing precisely what's happening in any real complex system (as opposed to a computer simulation), but that's not what I'm talking about here.

A branching state is one that falls within the range of precursory conditions for more than one distinct outcome. In practical terms the art of creating and maintaining options is one of intentionally creating a branching state and delaying its resolution into commitment to a specific outcome. This is sometimes referred to as hedging one's bets, and accomplishing it without duplicate expenditure is the essence of good business management.

But branching states don't belong only to business; they're found in particle physics, music, and even the martial arts (techniques that originate in or pass through a common state which serves as an opportunity to switch between them). It's one of those general principles that form the vocabulary of systems.

Now for the point. I have a hunch humanity as a whole is either in or fast approaching a branching state, one that could go any of several very different ways. This is both scary and cause for hope. Change is a given, of course; it's the character of that change that remains in doubt.

Perhaps this would be a good time to take a lesson from business management, cultivating patience for the ambiguity of the situation, in the faith that the choices before us will become clearer with time, doing what seems best in the meantime.

it's not about Steve: finger/moon

2010-12-23T11:31:00.001-07:00

Steve Jobs isn't so proud that he's above taking in some good feelings from all the adulation he's received in recent years, and being named "person of the year" by Financial Times has got to feel good, but I imagine he feels a little guilty about it, not because he doesn't deserve it, but because it's another example of missing the point.

Steve Jobs isn't about Steve Jobs; he's about all of the cool stuff he gets to help bring into existence, with special emphasis on what hasn't yet been publicly revealed; he's about assembling a great team, excoriating them when they get sidetracked or confused, and giving them room to run when they're on the track of something worthy of the name Apple; he's about building Apple into a persistent force for thinking different.

To focus on the man in preference to the substance of his vision is akin to focusing on the finger pointing at the moon rather than follow its lead to the moon itself.

journalistic justice, the hard-won scoop

2010-12-21T11:01:00.001-07:00

Architosh, which claims to be "the leading Internet magazine dedicated to Mac CAD and 3D professionals and students worldwide" (with good reason), and the third party most responsible for keeping the idea of AutoCAD on the Mac alive, has published an extensive interview with Rob Maguire, AutoCAD for Mac Product Manager, who headed the team that implemented AutoCAD on Mac OS X (page 1 of 6).

where to from Avatar?

2010-12-19T17:50:00.001-07:00

If you already know what James Cameron has up his sleeve for the sequel(s) of Avatar, you might want to skip this post, because it's not about where he'll actually, eventually decide to go with the story, but about the constraints and choices he faces in making those decisions.

To begin with, you have a planet occupied by the Na'vi, who've had their moment of unmistakable first contact with an alien race, and won't be able to return to the innocence that preceded that moment. Moreover, as the first film ends, there's a small contingent of those aliens still on the planet, and most likely a few interstellar ships on the way at near lightspeed, with nowhere else to go other than to return to Earth, something they might not be able to do immediately or without resources from the planet. The Na'vi can cling to their nature-based ways, and their communion with Eywa, but they cannot forget that they are not alone in the cosmos, a fact about which they must surely be reminded each time their sun sets to reveal a sky half-lit by the gas giant about which their moon orbits, and the other moons which share it.

More importantly, the victory they've won is temporary. If RDA decided to take retribution, they could do it from the safety of space, by simply throwing rocks, which would arrive as meteorites, at Na'vi settlements and other strategic locations, beginning with their own base, to prevent news of the attack from getting back to Earth. To really defend themselves, the Na'vi would need a space fleet capable of intercepting and destroying incoming rocks or missiles before they reached target, and quickly. Perhaps Eywa could help with such a mobilization, particularly with accomplishing it without sacrificing their essential selves, embedded in the biology of Pandora as they are. Perhaps the tendrils with which they accomplish tsaheylu might be employed as a means of rapid instruction in science and technology. Perhaps a small percentage of the Na'vi might show an aptitude for such learning that would qualify them as geniuses on Earth, rapidly progressing beyond what they'd been taught to break new theoretical ground.

For Jake and Neytiri, there's the question of how much of Jake survives in the body to which his mind and soul transferred with Eywa's help, and whether he shares that body with echoes of his dead twin brother, the scientist, for whom the body was created and who presumably spent several hundred hours driving it before his untimely death, and before Jake. There's also the question of whether Jake can rise to the moment when doing so means making use of his celebrity to lead the Na'vi into a time of changes they cannot avoid, one which will continue long after his death.

There's a lot of sequel material there. How much of it translates well to a film the expectations for which are preconditioned by what was largely an action movie set on another planet remains an open question.

why we haven't yet seen real social computing

2010-12-17T11:37:00.001-07:00

Yes, people want to share discoveries and experiences with others, particularly with their friends, but not necessarily with their "friends" as defined by the social computing service du jour, and, in most cases, emphatically not with that service interjecting itself into the relationship.

A real social computing system would be more ubiquitous than the telephone network, and easier to use than the postal network. It would, at least in principle, include everyone on the planet in one way or another, even those living outside the reach of ground-based communications networks and on the economic fringe, unable to afford a phone much less a computer and a satellite datalink. It would be all about allowing people to connect with the other people with whom they wanted to connect, individually, in groups, and in context, as well as to avoid the whole range of threats and parasites. And, as much as possible, it would get out of the way and allow those connections to play out as naturally as possible.

The closest thing we have to this at the moment is internet mail, which, rather than being a proprietary service, relies upon the interoperability of thousands of services, based on a collection of standard protocols. For all of its inadequacies, email is the best available model.

That's not to say email should or even could serve as the basis for that social computing environment of the future, which is likely to require a fresh start. But as a standards-based experiment in interoperability, it can serve as a starting point for thinking about what might be required.

the impossible (but inevitable) takes a little longer

2010-12-15T11:01:00.001-07:00

While I'm not familiar with the company or their technology, the acquisition of Caustic Graphics by Apple supplier Imagination Technologies seems like a very good thing, not least because Imagination Tech's own products integrate well with ARM processors.

My interest in computing really got started in 1983, just prior to the introduction of the Macintosh in early 1984, and during the mid-80s I took several CS classes at Colorado State University. During that time I attended at least one meeting of the student chapter of the ACM, the advisor of which had come to Colorado State from the University of Utah and was a graphics specialist. He showed the group a ray-traced cartoon, which looked very realistic except that the characters were obviously composited from simple geometric figures (spheres, cylinders, and cones), and the motion betrayed a lack of application of the physics of mass, gravity, force, and momentum. For that time it was impressive.

He briefly discussed the amount of computing resources invested in its creation, the details of which I don't recall, but I was left with the impression that each frame consumed hours of CPU time. I remember commenting to him that it would be a while before we were doing that sort of thing in real time, to which his first reaction was a blank stare, as though the idea hadn't even occurred to him, followed a moment later by pointed agreement.

Twenty-five years later, it looks like that time is approaching.

265 hours of newly released Nixon tapes

2010-12-12T20:31:00.001-07:00

Think of Richard Nixon as a smarter, gentler version of Glenn Beck. It almost works, and says more about Beck than it does about Nixon.

While 265 hours of newly released tape recordings from his administration might well make for some interesting listening, they probably won't break any new ground with regard to the character of the only President ever to be hounded out of office between elections, a fate a few others have deserved more than he did, and one that his party has attempted to serve to every Democratic president since.

Nixon's bad luck was that he won the 1968 election, instead of 1960, inheriting America's military involvement in Vietnam at its height, and a country divided over what to do about it. That he took personally the criticism that inevitably stemmed from this situation, demonizing his political opponents, reveals a weakness in what was essentially a strong character. He had other weaknesses, of course, but how many people do you know who could go through what he went through and emerge from it only moderately bitter. He was made of sterner-than-average stuff, perhaps not quite up to what we expect from our Presidents, but few are.

tiered service suggestion for MobileMe

2010-12-11T15:38:00.001-07:00

Charles Jade, writing in theAppleBlog, makes a suggestion complete with pricing and service specifics, for a 3-tiered version of MobileMe. In this post he makes one excellent point...

"By making MobileMe free, those using it with iOS devices won’t be using services from Google or Microsoft, which makes switching to Windows Phone 7 or Android more difficult. While PC users would also have MobileMe free, they’d need to have iOS devices to make it really worth using. The Halo Effect, which argues that iOS device sales later lead to Mac sales mitigates the loss associated with giving away MobileMe to PC users in the present. If they do switch, free MobileMe helps encourage them to remain all-Apple in the future. Free MobileMe would be an investment in hardware customer retention, and it doesn’t even have to be completely free."

Personally, I'd go one step further, integrating the bottom tier of MobileMe with the iTunes Store, customers of which already have unique Apple IDs. The online storage associated with MobileMe could then be used to secure purchases, say at a 1:10 ratio (1 GB allotment usage for 10 GB of purchases or rentals, which wouldn't actually have to be stored redundantly in your account), in case your machine encountered some disaster and you had no local backup. Premium versions of MobileMe, offering more storage, could cover proportionally more rentals or purchases.

Customers who currently have MobileMe and iTunes accounts associated with different IDs could have both (all) Apple IDs associated with a single merged account.

Given the fiscal need to tie revenue to products and services provided, Apple could lace the free version of MobileMe with iAds, purchasing them itself if necessary to insure that the expenses involved were offset by revenue.

I'd also go one step further with the premium (family/workgroup/professional) version of MobileMe, providing it with some of the capabilities of Mac OS X Server, like the ability to create a wiki or a shared calendar in the cloud, which could be accessed by others with any type of MobileMe account, also merging in the iWork.com service. This tier should also have premium domain hosting and web authoring capabilities, like a professional version of iWeb.

Put enough value under one roof, at a price your customers perceive to be at least arguably a bargain, and there'll be many more customers than if they have difficulty justifying the purchase. This argument is far more compelling for services with relatively high up-front costs and low incremental costs than it is for hardware products with higher incremental costs.

Apple has maintained the price of MobileMe at a high enough level that they should be able to offer a complete, very sophisticated service without raising prices at all, and the cost of operating a basic subset of that service should by this time be low enough to be coverable through tasteful advertising alone, allowing it to be offered for free, with the competitive benefits that Charles Jade outlines above.

Apple's ripple effects, and their ripple effects

2010-12-10T11:15:00.001-07:00

Bloomberg reports that Foxconn, Apple's largest manufacturing partner, has exceeded one million employees in China. That's approximately 1/10 of 1% of China's overall population, or one person in every thousand, who are being exposed, hands-on to Apple's high standards in design, materials, fabrication, and assembly, developing skills that are applicable elsewhere, and earning enough to be able to send a little home, save a bit, or make the occasional purchase of some non-essential product, like the iOS devices they're building. They're also participating in a massive exercise in logistics, as Foxconn scales up to handle the increasing demand for their primary customer's products.

Just as happened in Japan, which in the wake of World War II was the cheap, semi-skilled labor pool of the 1950s, Foxconn's workers are beginning to demand even better wages and working conditions. So long as Apple's competition is also going to China for their manufacturing needs, and accommodating the demands of workers can be accomplished without it working to the disadvantage of one player or another, workers can expect to see gradual improvement in both wages and working conditions. At some point, however, the temptation of lower labor costs elsewhere will surely result in the movement of some operations to Central or Southeast Asia, India, Africa, or South America. If that difference in costs translates to a market advantage, others will follow. No doubt Foxconn is very aware of this possibility and determined to remain competitive.

Foxconn's CEO has already stated that the company plans to eventually replace most assembly line workers with robots. Right now that's an expensive proposition, but if any company has both the means and the motivation to drive down the price of automation, it would be Foxconn. So, for some large percentage of those one million workers, their present jobs will last only so long as they don't price themselves out of the market, or until their places are taken by robots, whichever comes first. (Because the wages paid to Foxconn's workers are valued in proportion to the average income of a population 1000 times larger, those wages won't result in the same degree of inflation as occurred in Japan, so smaller wage increases can be expected, making the job loss to automation scenario more likely.)

That's, say, 800,000 at least semi-skilled workers, presumably with an acquired taste for quality, that will be released back into the Chinese labor pool, most likely gradually enough to be absorbed into other enterprises. Some of these will surely return to school to become engineers, while others will learn new trades and apply to them the uncompromising standards they're now learning by osmosis. The net effect will undoubtedly reach far beyond the wages they were paid while working for Foxconn, helping to boost China's fortunes generally and giving the country an even greater stake in maintaining stable relations with their neighbors and trading partners, improving the prospects for peace.

Meanwhile, those iOS devices they're producing will be helping to enliven minds around the world, with incalculable ripple effects.

the error in Ryan's logic

2010-12-09T10:20:00.001-07:00

In a gdgt.com article, the author, identified only as Ryan, concludes that doubling the dimensions of the iPad, as measured in pixels (quadrupling the total number of pixels) would not be enough to qualify the new device as having a "retina display" (one with a grain finer than the human retina can discern, such as the Retina Display (an Apple trademark) in the iPhone4 (another Apple trademark)). A cornerstone of his argument appears below...

"Now, the retina display was so named because Apple found that "there's a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch that... is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels."* This assumes holding the device about a foot from your eyes, but I think most people tend hold their phone and their iPad at roughly the same distance (between 15 and 20 inches), it it's probably fair to assume that the iPad retina display should still be somewhere around 300 PPI.

* From Steve's WWDC 2010 keynote; skip to about 36:30 minutes for the retina display introduction."

That's some pretty strange reasoning.

First, I think he's wrong about most people holding phones 15 to 20 inches from their eyes, but even if he's right it's the 12-inch assumption associated with the 300 ppi (pixels-per-inch) figure that matters. If a device is held further away than 12 inches, it requires fewer than 300 ppi to saturate the retina of the human eye, at 24 inches only 150 ppi are needed to achieve the same effect, or 200 ppi at 18 inches.

At 2048 X 1536, a double-dimension iPad display is comfortably above 200 ppi, and even slightly above the 240 ppi that would be needed at 15 inches distance from the eyes, the lower limit of Ryan's own estimate of how far away people hold their iPads, so, assuming the guideline of 300 ppi at 12 inches is accurate, it would definitely qualify as a retina display.

I'm not predicting what Apple will do. The 1024 X 768 display in the first-generation iPad is already very crisp, and they just might decide to stick with it for another year, perhaps lowering prices a bit and concentrating on increasing frame rates in games, or they might increase the screen dimensions by a factor lower than 2. A 1.5 increase would mean 1536 X 1152, still qualifying as a retina display at 20-inches from the eyes, the upper limit of Ryan's range, while increasing the total number of pixels by only 2.25, a factor low enough that they could probably still manage a performance increase by going to a CPU using dual A9 cores paired with any of several GPUs. More importantly, they might be able to put all that together without a price increase that would drive many people to other platforms.

Jumping to a 2048 X 1536 display sounds risky, but if Apple's suppliers can build them fast enough, without significant delays to tweak the production process, at a low enough price, with a low enough failure rate, they just might go for it.

the misleading Mac vs. iOS dichotomy

2010-12-07T10:32:00.001-07:00

Writing for MacWorld, John Gruber makes a case for the near-term persistence of the Mac, but casts doubt on its long-term relevance, and linking to the article from his own blog, the link text he chooses is "All Good Things Must Come to an End" and the article provides an implied subtext 'just not right now.'

Why so much gloom over the Mac's future when sales are through the roof? As Gruber says himself "The irony is that there’s more doubt today about the long-term prospects of the Mac than there has been at any time since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997." The driving factor isn't Windows, of course, but iOS, Mac OS X's younger, more svelte sibling. People look at sales figures for the iPad, note it is already selling faster than the Mac, and start counting the days, weeks, months, or years until the Mac's demise.

Time for a reality check!

To begin with, iOS and Mac OS X are far more similar than different. The main difference between them is in the libraries supporting the user interface, AppKit on the Mac and UIKit on iOS devices. Below that level, they're practically identical, and becoming more nearly so with each release. (Parts which were originally left out of iOS due to resource limitations can be folded back in as more capable hardware becomes the norm, and some parts which originated in iOS are finding their way into Mac OS X.) The truth is, following their initial divergence to enable support of a touchscreen interface and limited hardware, and the fact they remain on separate tracks for the time being, in the long term they will probably reconverge. I'll come back to this point.

Not very long ago, "Mac" meant a machine with a keyboard, a pointing device (mouse or trackpad), an optical drive, a few ports, and a screen at least 13" from corner to corner, with a dual-core (or larger) Intel processor combined with a multi-core dedicated graphics processor, and running Mac OS X. The MacBook Air removed the optical drive from this definition, and more recently dropped the lower limit of the screen size to 11".

On the other hand, whereas the original iPhone required a bit of hacking before you could use an external keyboard with it, the iPad had a keyboard dock available in roughly the same time frame as its own release. Obviously, Apple recognizes an on-screen keyboard isn't an acceptable substitute for a physical keyboard for many purposes. And if they haven't yet made it possible to use a mouse or trackpad with an iPad, they certainly could. If they're holding off, it's probably because they're working on a comprehensive solution for the combination of two subtly different user interaction paradigms.

This is how I see iOS and Mac OS X converging, through each gaining the ability to support the other's UI paradigm. Just as you now see keyboards connected to iPads, you might also see touchscreens connected to Macs, something which has actually been possible for awhile, thanks to Wacom, and I believe there are also apps which enable the connection of an iPad as a touchscreen peripheral, although they probably pair with specific Mac apps, rather than providing general touchscreen utility.

In very simple terms, this means building a version of iOS including AppKit, and a version of Mac OS X including UIKit. The reality is no doubt a good deal more complicated, but that's the nutshell version.

For the developer, the path to taking maximum advantage of this is through distributing app components across the whole range of devices, with each device running the components that make sense for it, given its intrinsic capabilities. For Apple this presents a choice between leaving developers to work this out for themselves in a hundred different ways or to provide a framework which makes it straightforward. I can't imagine Apple wouldn't choose the latter.

So, if the Mac disappears at all, it will be disappearing into something larger and even more powerful, pieces of which will fit in your pocket, or on your wrist, but most likely there will continue to be machines called Macs, using a keyboard and pointing device as their default paradigm, until the market for such machines shrivels up, by which time most of us will have ceased to care, else there would still be a market.

RobotsPodcast.com

2010-12-04T16:33:00.001-07:00

Have I mentioned the Robots Podcast here yet? Oh, probably, but it really does bear repetition.

Between the Robots Podcast and its predecessor, Talking Robots (scroll down), well over a hundred episodes have been archived, each of which features at least one interview with someone deeply involved in robotics or and/or a related field (animal behavior, for instance), with occasional detours into cultural responses to the advent of adaptive machines. Actively listening to the entire collection must be equivalent to a graduate level survey course in robotics.

Each episode has its own web page, and the links on those pages, taken together, read like a compendium of top-flight robotics programs and companies, if not comprehensive then a very good start on being so. It's a great way to get a quick overview of who is doing what, where.

Check it out: RobotsPodcast.com

will Apple sandbox Mac apps?

2010-12-04T11:00:00.001-07:00

You know, most Window's users would hardly notice if they weren't able to use software other than Office to manipulate their Office-generated documents. They already behave very much as though Windows were a sandboxed environment, with one big sandbox and a handful of smaller ones.

That's a far cry from the experience of most Mac users. Aside from iTunes, which must be used to connect to Apple's online content and app stores, to a lesser extent Safari, which is the best browser for use with all Apple websites, including MobileMe, and Xcode for programming for the Mac and iOS, there's no one Mac application or suite of applications that dominates any use category. For whatever you might want to do, there's a choice, and it's common for Mac users to first use one software tool, then another, then another, in a workflow that makes use of the best characteristics of several programs.

This is harder to do in a sandboxed environment, like iOS was originally and still is, except as developers take advantage of provisions for file sharing between applications.

Would Apple similarly cramp multi-app workflows on the Mac?

There's probably two answers to this question, "no" and "yes".

No, we're not going to find that some major update to Mac OS X comes at the price of the inability to save a file with one app and open it in another. Not tomorrow, probably not ever.

On the other hand, Apple probably will find a way to provide some of the security that iOS gains from sandboxing, without actually imposing sandboxes, for the most part.

One way in which they've already done this is their use of property list files, which use a small set of basic object types to wrap data, and make it extremely unlikely that data will be run as code by accident, or by any program other than the one that saved it. Property list support is ubiquitous in Apple's frameworks, and they're very simple for the application programmer to use.

Something else Apple might do is to verify that saved files conform to the type they claim to be, that a JPEG is actually organized as a JPEG and not concealing something that doesn't belong. Developers that provide executable definitions for their custom file types might be given more elbow room than those who don't go to the trouble, and developers who don't go to the trouble might be presented with a choice between using standard file types and property lists exclusively or having their applications sandboxed, prompting some to cry "foul" and others to characterize them as whiners for doing so. Does the operating system have a right to know, in general terms, the content of every file? Of course it does; end of subject.

That's a plausible scenario for how Mac OS X might evolve in the wake of the advent of iOS, far more plausible than the scarecrow that Mac owners might look up from some software update to find their machines locked down. Sure, some apps might be sandboxed, until and unless their developers get with the program, but not the system as a whole, and, most likely, not anything distributed by a reputable company, for which the user paid real money; such apps would already have been updated by the time the deadline arrives.

So quit worrying and enjoy the ride, and think twice before using a custom file type that you aren't prepared to nail down with a schema, or something similar.

TBL warns Web fragmenting into walled gardens

2010-11-19T11:01:00.001-07:00

While I've yet to read more than the first page of Tim Berners-Lee's latest, I've already stumbled across several statements that merit response, the following in particular.

TBL writes "The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles."

Certainly, in part, but the potential for profit played no small part in motivating most of those involved, who shared that egalitarian vision only insofar as it served their own proprietary purposes. For example, contending browser vendors attempted to push through their own extensions to the initial standards, with an eye to reaping licensing fees for their use.

It's testimony to the purity of TBL's own motivation that he can still see the development of the Web in such terms, and apparently believe that it is only recently succumbing to the taint of divisive commercial interests, but, as well informed as his view undeniably is, it fails the test of objectivity.

There was never any chance that the Web could grow as it has while existing in isolation from such influences. The best possible outcome would be if the Web continues to make provision for the unencumbered exchange of information and opinion, alongside the walled gardens and pay-to-play sites, far into the future.

something BIG

2010-11-15T11:29:00.001-07:00

When Steve Jobs suggests that Apple's $50+ Billion in liquid assets was being saved for the opportunity to acquire something big, we shouldn't confine our thinking to the obvious, companies with market caps smaller than Apple's mountain of cash.

Take, for instance HP. If things continue as they are for awhile longer, Apple's cash reserves will surpass HP's market cap in a few years, but even before that it might be possible to execute an acquisition that included an issue of new stock.

So, why would Apple be the least bit interested in buying HP, nostalgia aside?

HP is among the more nimble of the well established technology companies, and has a reputation for quality that suggests its corporate culture might at least be compatible with Apple's. It has a more diverse product line than does Apple, with distribution channels to match, and has a huge collection of intellectual property, including that recently acquired along with Palm.

But HP sells computers that run Windows! What good would that be to Apple?

To begin with, Apple could make sure those computers all shipped with Safari, iTunes, and MobileMe Control Panel preloaded, and include the same trial MobileMe account that they do for Mac buyers. Apple has plenty of experience with supporting Windows, so this much wouldn't even be a challenge.

Beyond that, Apple could alter the circuit board designs to make them Mac-compatible, and offer them with Windows, Mac OS X, or both, picking up some additional after-market business from people who bought Windows-only machines and later had regrets. People who were leaning towards getting a PC but tempted by Macs would flock to HP in droves, taking business away from its PC competitors.

I'm not predicting that Apple will acquire HP, only pointing out that a case for doing so might be made, and suggesting that this illustrates how broad a net is needed to gather in all of the possibilities for what Apple might do with its hoard.

of rack-mount systems and mysterious data centers

2010-11-05T10:35:00.001-06:00

Standard 19-inch and 23-inch rack-mount systems exude the sort of geekiness found in serious IT departments and data-services operations. Is it even conceivable that their days might be numbered?

Apple's choice to discontinue their Xserve line just as their own huge data center in North Carolina is about to come online might seem to suggest they think so, but chances are that new data center will be chock-full of rack-mount hardware, just mainly not Xserves.

I expect a significant contributing factor in Apple's decision to discontinue the Xserve is that they found it wasn't a competitive option for them in equipping the new Maiden, NC facility, even considering that they could sell it to themselves for something like 30% below retail.

Perhaps also, and this is pure speculation, given their investment in miniaturization, a 19-inch rack-mount system is simply too inefficient in its use of space. That might not seem relevant when the size of your data center is measured in acres, but once it fills up that space becomes precious, and configurations that waste it won't survive long. Perhaps they plan to switch to a narrower (10-inch ?) rack-mount system that can fit nearly twice as many devices into the same space. Given the size of the facility, they can probably design and build something for themselves more economically than they can buy from another supplier, especially considering the possibility of using A4 chips or similar ARM-based SOCs, paired with commodity hard drives, and running some variant of Darwin, iOS, or Mac OS X, and doing so would provide them with valuable experience, helping them gain traction with the enterprise in the future.

On the other hand, their need for such a data center may have developed too quickly for them to rely upon technology developed in-house, at least at the outset.

For most of us, the nature of the services that data center will support is more important and far more interesting, but those of us with a geekstreak will continue to wonder over the technology in use until such questions are answered.

getting a handle on Flash

2010-11-05T08:52:00.001-06:00

Cult of Mac has published instructions for uninstalling Flash, together with instructions for reinstalling it if you decide that's what you want, and a pointer to ClickToFlash, which replaces Flash content with an inert rectangle bearing the word "Flash", unless you click on that rectangle, in which case the Flash content is displayed.

And here's John Gruber of Daring Fireball on essentially the same topic.

code as content; code as a vector of change

2010-10-29T11:04:00.001-06:00

First came symbolic speech. Thousands of languages and dialects blossomed, and the words of some, the shamans, those believed to have direct experience of a spirit world, seemed to possess magical potential.

Then came writing. The great variety of spoken language began to be replaced by preservation approaching permanence, joined shortly by the rigor of peer review and explicit criticism, and the magical potential of the words of the shamans, became invested instead in interpreters, the priests and scribes.

Perhaps presaging what was to follow, a variant of writing, plays, developed into instructions to be performed by acting companies.

Then came machine code, a variant of writing that controls the operation of hardware designed to process such instructions. Very early on that machine code gained conditional branching, the ability to perform different sets of instructions based on the value of some numerical/logical expression. At that point it must have already been apparent to a few that something like machine code would eventually surpass conventional writing, by virtue of its potential to directly control the actions performed by machines. At about the same time, a process of increasing abstraction began, whereby machine code was wrapped in assembler code, which was itself wrapped in higher languages, more closely resembling conventional writing.

Thus far, the impact of computer code on what these days passes for natural language (speech having already been molded by thousands of years of close association with writing) has been to facilitate its production, dissemination, and consumption, but that's only a small part of the whole story.

Computer code, embedded in machinery, has the potential to render meaning tangibly, as real physical performance, with real consequences, good or bad. Given that the design and production of machinery is itself becoming increasingly automated, the question becomes one of what you want the machines to do, and not do, and how those desires can be represented in code.

For example, I can say that I want to preserve what remains of Earth's original biological diversity, while at the same time reducing the dependence of agriculture on petroleum, but in that form it is merely a feeble wish, displaced by the next thought. I can write a treatise explaining why we ought to do what we can to preserve what remains of Earth's original biological diversity and free agriculture from dependence on petroleum, and it may stir others momentarily, but it takes more than that to make any real difference, and if I were to be asked exactly what I'm talking about in practical terms my answer isn't likely to satisfy those whose livelihoods would be effected by any such initiative.

If, on the other hand, I express my intention in the language of machine design and control logic (computer code), the implications, not only of the basic design but of various approaches to managing the system, can be explored through simulation, and that expression goes a long way towards constituting a detailed plan for its own implementation. It's all just code, even the design for the physical machinery, but in a form that makes the decision to go forward with it almost as easy as the decision to flip a switch, at least as compared with a vague call for the desired end results.

Such a project would be too big for any individual, of course, so tools that facilitate collaboration on such projects are needed. Some such tools already exist; others remain to be invented, and much effort is being expended in this direction, even if those involved don't see their work in such grand terms, with the potential to achieve change that could never be achieved through conventional political means alone.

the parts of Lion which remain secret

2010-10-21T11:09:00.001-06:00

I must confess some disappointment over yesterday's announcement, not because the stuff they showed wasn't cool - it was! - but because the stuff that interests me the most remains secret. What we saw of Lion were mainly user interface enhancements, a category that was famously, intentionally missing from Snow Leopard, which concentrated on bug fixes and lower level enhancements. It might even be that the pause in the introduction of new user interface features, represented by Snow Leopard, made possible the integration of such features seen in Lion's new Mission Control view.

But what's Lion got to compare with OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch? Something, most likely, but that something remains secret. Does it have a new file system or file system abstraction layer? Does it bring true resolution independence? Are any technologies developed for Apple application software, like iPhoto's face recognition, moving into system code and becoming available to third party applications? Are there any important new APIs?

Patience, I try to tell myself, which of the major releases of Mac OS X has not brought such advancements? Maybe 10.1, which was primarily a bug fix and code efficiency update to 10.0. Are they out of ideas? Surely not! Are they underfunding lower level R&D? Not likely. What then?

A Mac OS X engineering position announcement awhile back stated quite plainly that a successful applicant could wind up working on something unprecedented and revolutionary. Sure, Apple spreads such verbiage a little thick at times, but the clear implication was there's something big happening in the wings, and the timing was such that it's likely to be included in Lion, which won't be released until next summer.

Moreover, in yesterday's collection of announcements, everyone on stage was careful to point out that only some of Lion's features were being shown. Clearly there's something else, something they aren't yet ready to talk about.

Something else Steve was careful about, in discussing touch input on Macs and how they've concluded that it just doesn't work on a vertical screen, was that he was talking about laptops, not necessarily all Macs. So, perhaps this recently revealed Apple patent is more than a design exercise. Time will tell.

Nice kitty!

2010-10-13T10:07:00.001-06:00

The invitation for an Apple Event taking place one week from today strongly suggests that the primary topic of the day will be the next major version of Mac OS X, 10.7, and that the cat-name for this version will be "Lion". Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar (the first to be marketed as such), Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and now Lion.

Recent versions have brought, in no particular order, the Kernel Extension APIs, the Acceleration Framework, Spotlight, Core Animation, Core Data, OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, and Objective-C 2. What might 10.7 have in store to match these?

Something, no doubt. ;-)

China meets the iPad

2010-09-17T10:40:00.001-06:00

China isn't just another market, much as the iPad isn't just another gadget.

China is the most populous country on Earth and has one of the fastest growing economies. So much for the obvious.

While China's economy is rocketing upwards at an annual rate of eight percent, the spending power of most individual citizens is still modest, which makes the affordable iPad a good match.

What makes it an even better match is the touchscreen input, which doesn't discriminate against character-based input, providing the iPad an even greater advantage over keyboard-based netbooks in China than elsewhere.

The advantage the iPad has over other touchscreen tablets, running other operating systems, is more subtle but still substantial, deriving from factors such as attention to detail in both hardware and software, a fast-maturing application software market, and the goodwill Apple has gained through its efforts to improve conditions for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers involved in manufacturing its products (even though it turns out those conditions weren't so bad in the first place, aside from the economic incentives for workers to put in exorbitant amounts of overtime, or to end their lives for the compensation their families would receive as a result).

The iPad is destined to be a particularly huge hit in China, but the whole world will benefit from this.

AutoCAD returns to the Mac, and comes to iOS in the bargain

2010-08-31T09:31:00.001-06:00

As before, I merely pass along a pointer to Architosh's report, which discusses the iOS companion program as well as AutoCAD itself.

Architosh also reports on what appears to be a 60-second TV spot, produced (or at least paid for) by AutoDesk, the company behind AutoCAD.

perseverance and pride

2010-08-30T10:53:00.001-06:00

I've already said most of what there is to say about the event itself here, but what I only mentioned briefly there is that it's been a long, long time coming, with the project going through metamorphosis again and again. I had a need to do something that would contribute to bringing the world of music back around to an appreciation of the role of harmonics in melody, not just in harmony, or at least that's how it began. Arguably, I've accomplished that.

Along the way it also became an issue of pride in craftsmanship, as an amateur programmer with experience in Apple's approach to supporting application software. That and avarice may collaborate to drive the project further, perhaps much further, but for now I have a sense of contingent satisfaction, the degree of satisfaction being contingent on the degree of traction my creation manages to garner.

Of course, a free app with no ad revenue doesn't do much to feed avarice, so I'm left with pride in craftsmanship, for now, which is probably just as well; it's what drives me to do my best work.

party politics in a nutshell

2010-08-26T09:53:00.001-06:00

I'm registered to vote, but not affiliated with any political party, at the moment.

That said, here's what remains of my impressions of the two main political parties.

The Democrats have a huge investment in appearing high-minded, and consequently manage to be right about what should happen a little more often.

The Republicans have two distinct constituencies, for one of which they must appear to be at least adequately morally upright, and for the other of which they must make it clear that morality doesn't extend to the wholesale confiscation and repurposing of wealth. It's a delicate dance, and, as a consequence, they manage to be right about what will happen a little more often.

Both are people, with all that means, good and bad.

how to improve upon Mac OS X 10.6?

2010-08-17T10:40:00.001-06:00

Update: John Siracusa weighs in

From my perspective, that looks like a tall order, but so far it's looking like a slow news week, and Cristopher Ryan, writing in the Apple Blog, has asked What Could Make OS X 10.7 Great? so I'll have a go.

Without really understanding the issues involved, let me echo Ryan's call for a new file system. Everyone who followed such developments seemed encouraged by the hope that ZFS was just around the corner, when it appeared to be so, and then Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and suddenly we were back in bed with HFS+, with no realistic alternatives on the horizon. Meanwhile, whatever Apple is using for a file system in iOS devices is fairly free to evolve, since iOS apps are sandboxed and only have access to the narrow slice of that system that relates directly to them. Also, being flash memory devices with no hard drives, they have different abilities and requirements as compared with a desktop machine. One possibility for the future is that iOS's refined handling of flash memory might be grafted into HFS+ at about the same time that Macs other than the MacBook Air get a bank of flash memory or a solid state drive to augment their massive (but slower) hard drives. Granted, this probably won't be enough to satisfy those who really understand file system issues.

Another iOS capability that might be brought to Mac OS X is the full-blown touch interface, not just the trackpad gestures supported by the Magic Trackpad (which I love!). (If you think the possibility of touchscreen Macs isn't even on Apple's radar, check out this and this.)

Something not yet implemented in iOS, that I hope to see sooner rather than later is low-level support for machine vision, stereo machine vision to be precise, meaning dual video cameras atop MacBook screens and Cinema Displays, or, perhaps better, a dual camera accessory, also sporting stereo microphones, with motorized pan, tilt, and zoom, as well as automatic focus and aperture, benefitting from the same attention to detail as the original iSight. It would be enough if it could do good quality stereo video recording, editable in iMovie, to begin with, leaving any machine vision applications for the following year.

Mostly, I'd like Apple to continue with the transformative process that was the main selling point of 10.6 over 10.5, making the next version even more coherent, robust, and svelte.

whichever comes first

2010-08-08T11:31:00.001-06:00

An Engadget article on the relationship between Apple and AT&T cites a legal action as confirming "the handset was originally locked to AT&T / Cingular for a full five years." In reading that it occurred to me that there might have been another factor written into the original contract, some number of iPhone activations, that would automatically shorten the period of exclusivity if it were to be reached before the full term expired, without any renegotiation of the contract.

Given that iPhones have out-sold everyone's expectations, such a clause could be expected to fire, but the exact timing would remain indefinite until just a few days remained.

new version of Safari feels faster

2010-07-29T17:02:00.001-06:00

I've got nothing to compare them with, but here's my SunSpider JavaScript results (late '08, 2.4 GHz MacBook, running Mac OS X 10.6.4).

breaking Windows dependency, a stepwise approach

2010-07-24T22:13:00.001-06:00

Apple is beginning to invest in outreach to small businesses, but for this initiative to enjoy maximum success they'll need to understand the constraints that keep businesses dependent on Microsoft's inferior Windows platform.

Mainly it's a matter of time, or the lack of it; Windows keeps IT personnel too busy to investigate alternatives. Ironically, some IT departments still have a Windows-only rule, to avoid having to spend the extra time to learn to support other platforms, even though doing so might pay off in the long run, through reduced need for support.

Of course, time is just another word for money, and money is perpetually oversubscribed in any small business, the upshot being that it takes an iron will to consider total cost of ownership above initial price. Support somehow becomes a separate issue, subsumed under the necessity of having an IT department at all, and is effectively rendered a non-issue by (mainly voiceless) repetition of "that's what we pay them for."

So how to break into this circle of nonoptionality?

The first step probably has to be taken by the company (or IT department) itself, rescinding their Windows-only policy in principle. Until that happens, the best arguments in the world fall on deaf ears.

Once they've taken that step, other platforms can compete for their business on the merits, and once that's true new opportunities appear, as if by magic. Many of those opportunities will take the form of workstations that can easily be replaced by something else (a Mac mini, for instance), either because their users have no need for specialized software or because what they do need happens to be written in Java or some scripting language that will run just as happily on other platforms, or it runs on a web server and they can access it through any modern browser.

Those are the easiest sales, but there's another category that doesn't involve substitution but rather the insertion of a new layer, workgroup servers, into the company's network. I can say this with confidence, because Windows Server is so expensive only the most successful small companies will have seriously considered providing a dedicated machine running Windows Server for each workgroup. Others might be aware of the potential benefits that groupware running on workgroup servers can bring, but for most the cost of Windows Server will have proven prohibitive. Not so with other platforms. Apple's Mac mini server, for example, costs $1000, no matter how many client machines you connect to it, and it comes with the basic categories of groupware already installed.

Another selling point (for Macs) that shouldn't be overlooked is the relative ease of development of custom applications, presenting the possibility of crafting what you really need, whatever it might be, in-house, rather than making do with what you can find elsewhere. Microsoft has made the creation of simple databases and automated spreadsheets fairly easy, but beyond that you're pretty much on your own. Anyone with the skill to create an automated spreadsheet of more than trivial complexity can learn to build practically anything on the Mac, and well written Objective-C is self-documenting, so if they leave someone else should be able to pick up where they left off.

Of course, for the really tough cases, Macs run Windows just fine.

wisdom regarding the value of failure

2010-07-10T20:26:00.001-06:00

a notion regarding Apple TV

2010-07-08T20:32:00.001-06:00

A strange thought just crossed my mind. What if Apple, rather than combining the AppleTV with the the Mac mini, were to instead combine it with the Time Capsule? The result would be an AirPort base station, plus a largish, reliable hard drive, plus video hardware and ports to allow wired connection to your TV or home theater setup. One product, three complementary uses. Make that four complementary uses, as such a device would surely also run iOS Apps, including games.

The hard drive could automatically be divided between maintaining a media library and preserving Time Machine backups. The AirPort functionality would work equally well to stream media to another device, or to allow you to connect controller hardware for games, or enabling your laptop or desktop to send incremental TM backups, or simply as a means of connecting to the internet.

Really, if your starting point is the AppleTV, all that's needed is a faster CPU and GPU, something adequate for games, a larger hard drive, and the software in a Time Capsule. The A4 chip is probably an adequate CPU, although a dual-core variant or something based on the next generation ARM design might be preferable given the need to drive a 1920 X 1080 display, but these parts shouldn't be prohibitively expensive.

Hmmm...

a quiet suggestion regarding the rebranding of Mac OS X

2010-06-27T11:14:00.001-06:00

As viewed from the perspective of iOS, what is Mac OS X, really?

Is it the supercharged, full-featured version? That was more the case before the introduction of iOS4 than now, following that milestone. There is probably still an argument to be made for this view, but not as strong an argument as before. The biggest remaining difference is that Mac OS X handles a multi-window environment and full-blown multitasking. On the other hand, it doesn't yet handle touch events out of the box.

Is it the parent, with legacy issues? Parent, maybe; legacy issues, not so much. Most legacy issues in Mac OS X have already been dealt with. The biggest remaining one is probably the file system, HFS+, which dates back to later versions of the original Mac OS.

Is it the older, bigger brother? As a metaphor, this one actually works pretty well. Mac OS X has been around longer, is quite a bit more massive, and optimized for completeness as well as for performance, as measured both from the interface-response perspective of the user and with regard to battery life.

Being optimized for completeness means, among other things, that it supports a wide variety of hardware. A single installation disk can be used to install Snow Leopard on any of dozens of Mac models, with varying CPUs, GPUs, support chips, monitor resolutions, etc.

It also means that new features that aren't tied to a touch interface, or to one of the special capabilities built into the iPhone and other members of the iOS family, are likely to appear in Mac OS X first, especially if they involve a large amount of code/resources, or place a significant burden on the hardware.

So you could think of Mac OS X as being the extended version of iOS, or, given that it runs on more powerful harder, maybe the extreme version.

To come back around to the question of rebranding, "iOS Portable" (or Mobile), "iOS Desktop", and "iOS Server" works very nicely, except that it might begin to be confusing if you have laptop computers running "Desktop" and desktop computers or set-top boxes or tablets too large to carry around running "Portable" or "Mobile".

On the other hand, "iOSx", with a small 'x', no longer a Roman numeral, would also work, unusually quietly as such things go. Combined with separate versioning (iOS 4.x being contemporary with iOSx 10.6.x), it sufficiently distinguishes the products, while making it very clear that they are fundamentally variations on the same basic design.

a truck is in the eye of the beholder

2010-06-06T17:53:00.001-06:00

Update: Jason Snell, writing on MacWorld.com addresses the angst of Mac users regarding its possible obsolescence. In a nutshell, he says not soon.

I just want to say that, here in Boulder, trucks, mainly SUVs, are rather common.

That said, I'd like to point to Patently Apple's piece on The Next OS Revolution, and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Architosh on AutoCAD on the Mac

2010-05-24T21:41:00.001-06:00

They've been leading the wishing section for years, now it's their turn to crow!

Adobe's founders fume mindlessly in public

2010-05-13T09:35:00.001-06:00

The biggest problem with the open letter released by Adobe's founders is there's no there there, no substantive argument.

They warn against the web fragmenting into closed systems, but in fact the exact opposite is happening, the web is unifying into an open system with a common language; it's reaching maturity.

One Adobe creation, the Portable Document Format will constitute an important part of the new web reality, in no small part because it is no longer proprietary. When Adobe turned PDF over to the ISO, all objections against its use disappeared. Had they done the same thing with Flash, the result would likely have been the same, and Flash would now be joining HTML5, the DOM, CSS, and Javascript as part of the emerging standard. In that alternate reality, even Apple would likely be happy to support it because they would be writing their own implementation to their own high standards, and Adobe, having had a huge head start, could continue to dominate the market for tools to create Flash content.

Instead Adobe chose to keep Flash a proprietary format. They should not be surprised that others' reactions run from lukewarm acceptance to outright rejection.

That Flash can be made to run acceptably on mobile devices, and that some web developers would prefer to keep using it rather than learn to use the open standards, doesn't even remotely constitute evidence that the future of the web is at risk unless every platform vendor were to allow it on their systems. Flash is common, yes, but its percentage of installation has already peaked and is beginning to dwindle. It is not and now will never be part of the standard, even if Adobe were to finally see the light and turn it over to the ISO or W3C; it's too late for that.

Simon Sinek at TED

2010-05-10T20:55:00.001-06:00

This speech was delivered last year at a TED conference in Washington state.

Click here for full frame.

using physical brushes with touchscreens

2010-05-04T11:42:00.001-06:00

Bill Gates says pen-based tablets will beat the iPad, at least with students.

Something like a decade ago, one of my favorite rant topics was ‘where oh where is the electronic brush?’ I was referring not to brush gadgets such as are common in drawing programs, but to a physical brush that could be used in conjunction with an electronic display. At the time I imagined a brush composed of optical fiber, along with some internal electronics to detect the hotspot of a CRT as it passed beneath the bristles, and more electronics in the computer itself to correlate the signal generated by the brush with a position on the screen.

Well, CRTs are hard to find these days, and LCD screens don't have hotspots. On the other hand, touchscreens have become quite common, and at least those used by Apple are good enough to use for drawing.

The trick would be to find a bristle material, or the combination of a bristle material and the internal design of the brush, that would sufficiently mimic the capacitance of a finger to be detected as such. You can use as fine a brush as the touchscreen will reliably detect.

The difference between such a brush and a pen-input system might appear negligible, to the casual observer, but would be far more pronounced to the person actually using the device, due to the difference between the gradual contact of a brush and the sudden contact of a pen. Moreover, a brush would provide pressure information directly to the device, via the touchscreen, without need for a Bluetooth connection, and clues to nuanced movement via the rolling or rotation of the triangular area contacted by the tip, so you'd be able to use it to move sliders or rotate dial gadgets using very small motions of your fingers.

Also consider that the written language used throughout east asia is traditionally drawn with a brush, and is still more legible done by brush than with with a pen.

Besides which, there's an elegance to brushes that no pen can match, and the main reason for using a hard pen, multipart forms, simply isn't a consideration on a touchscreen.

TOO COOL!

2010-05-04T10:07:00.001-06:00

Click here for the full-frame version.

not quite the Holy Grail, but...

2010-05-02T19:31:00.001-06:00

There is now some reason beyond vain hope to think that AutoCAD will be coming to Mac OS X!

the marketplace of unmitigated, hateful nonsense

2010-04-16T08:28:00.001-06:00

Update: It appears Apple may be prepared to reconsider Mr. Fiore's application and risk opening a can of worms.

It must have been a tough call, for whichever of the people Apple employees, to review iPhone/iPt/iPad apps that are submitted to the App Store, who was so unfortunate as to draw Mark Fiore's app. As an Apple employee, there's a pretty good chance they find a lot to agree with in the editorial content of Fiore's work, and would have liked to approve it, were it not clearly in violation of the section of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement covering objectionable material.

The point here is the precedent. If they were to allow Mr. Fiore's work into the store, on what basis could they refuse to allow Glenn Beck, or any of a hundred (thousand?) others of a similar stripe, to flaunt their drivel on the App Store?

I can't bring myself to blame Apple for not wanting to open up the App Store to such nonsense, nor for deciding that, in the interest of keeping it out, Mr. Fiore's work also had to be excluded.

(see the Dunning-Kruger effect, via Daring Fireball)

Dilger scores

2010-04-14T09:10:00.001-06:00

Despite his characteristically over-the-top manner, Daniel Eran Dilger does occasionally contribute a point or two that apparently hadn't occurred to others. Such is the case with his five myths piece on the exclusion of Flash from the iPhone.

another perspective on the most recent flap

2010-04-13T10:27:00.001-06:00

I haven't yet seen the license agreement for iPhone OS 4, because, in my own way, which means on my own time and in fits and starts, I'm working on something for the iPad, which won't be upgraded to iPhone OS 4 until fall. I have some hope of having something ready to ship before then, so I'm still on 3.2. Besides, my phone is an original iPhone, and won't be able to run 4.0, so even if I were working on an iPhone app I'd have to get something new to have a test device, and buying the iPad has already used up that budget for awhile.

But even when the time comes for me to switch to the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK, it won't matter one whit that Apple has precluded the use of middleware platforms, since I've quite enough on my hands learning what I need to know to make use of their own frameworks and have no intention of further complicating the task by bringing in someone else's.

Sure, I can see where someone who's been using Flash right along, and had been hoping to avoid the Cocoa Touch learning curve, might feel like they've been slapped down, but Apple's position on Flash has been plain as day for three years, or was until Adobe began muddying the waters by promising Flash developers that they would be able to compile to native iPhone OS apps using CS5. And it should be pointed out that Apple has already allowed some apps built with beta versions of CS5 into the App Store, for use on devices running pre-4.0 versions of iPhone OS, which right now is every iPhone OS device that isn't provisioned for iPhone OS 4.0 development, which includes all iPads. It's also possible that enterprises doing their own app distribution (outside of the App Store) will still be able to make use of this feature of CS5 even with 4.0, at their own risk of course. Apple has drawn a line in the sand, beginning with iPhone OS 4.0 apps submitted to the App Store.

The wiser pundits seem to agree that it's not so much about Flash as about allowing anything to come between developers and the platform Apple has so carefully constructed, and which they are using to push the state of the art. Any third-party middleware layer that became popular could (likely would) impose constraints on further development of the underlying native OS, if only by being slow to move off of deprecated APIs and to adopt new features.

It seems to me that there are two workable approaches to this, either you take the position that Apple has now taken for iPhone OS, beginning with version 4.0, or else you allow any such middleware platform, relying on the competition among them to force them to be good citizens, and using the native OS to set a high standard, which is the position Apple has taken for Mac OS X. Take Java for example. Java has never been allowed on the iPhone, but on Mac OS X Apple writes their own Java runtime. If they had access to the specifications that would allow them to do this for Flash also, they probably would.

This is probably the direction that Android is headed, but without the unitary native platform, since each manufacturer has their own approach, and Google hasn't yet shown much talent for herding cats. Another three years hence Apple will have an even stronger, unified platform, but where will Android be, lost under a pile of middleware platforms?

recent discovery: the Robots Podcast

2010-04-11T19:17:00.001-06:00

As someone who at least imagines himself to have a reputation for being a robotics enthusiast, you might expect me to be right on top of what are currently the best sources of open information in the field, but you'd be wrong.

My enthusiasm is primarily for service robots, machines that do tasks people find uncomfortable, boring, demeaning, dirty, dangerous, or insufficiently valuable, such that you cannot find people willing to do them for what you can afford to pay in any but the most starkly depressed economies.

This is a category that hasn't received much attention in recent years, with most press/blog coverage going to robots that physically mimic humans to varying degrees, and most hobbyist activity directed towards battlebots.

So perhaps it's understandable that something as excellent as the Robots Podcast could escape my awareness for nearly two years. In that time this biweekly podcast has accumulated a very impressive collection of interviews with some of the most brilliant people working in robotics and closely related fields.

It's available both via RSS and on iTunes. Do check it out!

a western understanding of chi/qi/ki

2010-04-04T12:41:00.001-06:00

Physical science, as it developed in the west, revolves around what can be compounded out of a few basic units, primarily mass, time, and distance. Velocity, for example, is simply distance divided by time (meters/second), and momentum is velocity multiplied by mass (kilograms*meters/second).

This approach became far more powerful with the advent of calculus, which addressed rates of change (differentiation) and accumulation (integration). Differentiation and integration are complimentary concepts.

It was through his invention of calculus that Newton was able to arrive at a theory of gravity (that the attraction between two objects varies proportionally to the inverse of the square of the distance between them, 1/r-squared), and combine that with momentum to determine that the planets trace out ellipses as they orbit the sun.

If you have a mathematical expression describing the position (in a single dimension) of an object over time, then velocity is the change in that position over time, and acceleration is the change in velocity over time. Another way of saying this is that velocity is the first derivative of position, and acceleration is the second. Actually computing the first derivative of the original expression will give you a new one which describes the instantaneous velocity of the object at any moment, and computing the first derivative of that will produce one that describes the instantaneous rate of change in that velocity at any moment, or the acceleration.

This first derivative of acceleration, which is to say the expression describing the instantaneous rate of change in acceleration, is variously referred to as jerk, jolt, surge, and lurch.

At this point I'm going to switch from physics to biology, to suggest that jerk is closely related to the effect produced by the firing of neurons to activate skeletal muscles. A single impulse produces a spasm, but little actual movement, whereas an escalating stream of impulses produces a progressive tightening of the muscle, accelerating whatever movement the muscle generates.

But the bodies of higher organisms can't operate through the activation of a single muscle. They make use of cyclical patterns involving many muscles, each of which will alternately contract and relax as it plays its part in the pattern. These patterns are imprinted within and coordinated by the cerebellum, which presents a simpler interface to the rest of the brain.

When you want to raise your arm, you just raise your arm, without having to think about which muscles are pulling on their tendon connections to your skeleton to accomplish this. When you want to run, you may think "left-right-left-right" and/or "faster, faster", but again you're not having to consciously juggle the hundreds or thousands of impulses per second that initiate and sustain the pattern; that's all being done automatically for you by your cerebellum.

The first time you do something new, you're likely to do it very slowly and deliberately, because your cerebellum can only estimate what pattern will work for the new action and your conscious mind is more directly involved to make sure that it stays on track. As the cerebellum gains experience, the conscious mind can safely leave the details to it and simply choose to perform or not perform the action, as well as when, in what direction, and how vigorously.

If you collect a sufficiently complete repertoire of available actions, that your cerebellum knows how to perform, you may find that you are able to string them together in novel combinations, and even to create new actions on the fly, to tie those sequences together. This is partly a matter of the higher brain coming to trust the ‘black box’ of the cerebellum, and to understand how to guide it.

At this point, within the range of the repertoire, the question ceases to be what can you do and becomes what will you do? How will you use it? And your response to that question is your intention.

To get back to the point, I see chi as being the degree of alignment between that intention and the pattern of neural activations the cerebellum produces. Someone whose ‘chi is very strong’ has a high degree of alignment, which is to say that what they intend and what they do are one and the same.

While the concept ‘chi’ is tightly interwoven with physical movement, similar degrees of alignment pertain to the use of speech and the cultivation of emotion. These might be termed truthfulness and respect.

Not the conclusion you were expecting?

the Day of the iPad

2010-04-03T18:15:00.001-06:00

No matter what fate awaits Apple's new product line, you've got to admit that it dominated the moment this morning.

Yes, I was in line too and bought one. Actually, I needn't have waited in line, as I had one reserved and could have picked it up anytime before 3:00 PM, but I wanted to be there, to participate in the launch.

Is it nice? Yes, very nice.

Am I already an expert user? Not hardly. That will take some time, even though I've been using an iPhone almost since the day they first went on sale.

Will it replace either my iPhone or my Mac? No. I can imagine that some future version might replace both, but not this model.

Will I use it in preference to those other devices for some purposes? Most likely, even when I have all three with me, although exactly which purposes remains to be seen. Watching video on a bus strikes me as a slam dunk; the iPad wins that one.

Is there something essentially right about the iPad, which no other device has previously manifested? Potentially. The idea of putting a color touchscreen on a device roughly half the size of a 13" MacBook's screen, split vertically, is brilliant, and the physical design of the iPad is superb, but so far the OS is still a version of iPhone OS, well evolved for the iPhone, but not yet ready to take full advantage of the iPad. That's sure to change; iPhone OS 4.0 will undoubtedly advance that process, and, what Apple hasn't foreseen will quickly be supplied by developers. It won't be long before we begin to really understand what's so special about such a device.

What I expect we'll discover is that the iPad is better suited than any device before it to bridge the gap between the user and the personal constellation, within the universe of information and connection, which they are drawn to explore.

25 years and still going

2010-04-01T10:51:00.001-06:00

The WELL's home page is a little more entertaining today than usual. I suppose such things are bound to happen given that its birthday falls on April Fools Day.

Colorado's best kept secret revealed: Boulder is the vortex

2010-03-21T18:53:00.001-06:00

Or at least that's what Google Maps running on some bay area iPhones seems to be suggesting.

add TCO to your TLA vocabulary

2010-03-17T09:58:00.001-06:00

TCO = Total Cost of Ownership, and refers to the purchase price plus the cost of support over the lifetime of a device, whether it be a computer or a fleet vehicle.

In a survey of corporate IT managers, the Enterprise Desktop Alliance found they responded that Macs were cheaper to manage far more frequently than the reverse (that PCs are cheaper to manage). The survey was divided into six categories, with the results varying from a low of 31% claiming Macs are cheaper vs. 23% claiming PCs are cheaper, with respect to software licensing fees, to a high of 65% claiming Macs are cheaper vs. 16% claiming PCs are, in the case of time spent troubleshooting.

Results in the other four categories fell somewhere in between, with the cost of supporting infrastructure coming in at 37% lower for Mac vs. 25% lower for PCs, system configuration 50% lower for Macs vs. 25% lower for PCs, user training 48% lower for Macs vs. 16% lower for PCs, and help desk calls 54% lower for Macs vs. 16% lower for PCs.

With such a strong indication that Macs really are cheaper to support, it's not so hard to imagine that they might actually have a lower total cost of ownership than PCs.

If you factor in productivity, those "cheap" PCs may be costing you even more.

37Signals takes a well-aimed shot at Karl Rove

2010-03-17T08:55:00.001-06:00

"Courage and Consequence" huh? That must be the courage to do the wrong thing, and consequences and how to avoid them.

ReadWriteWeb discovers Boulder

2010-03-14T21:51:00.001-06:00

It's true what they say, for a relatively laid back town, the population of which swells and shrinks noticeably in step with the University of Colorado's academic calendar, Boulder's got a lot going on.

(Posted from ‘The Goat’ mentioned here.)

intellectual rigor vs. the null hypothesis

2010-03-14T14:57:00.001-06:00

In sifting through old bookmarks, I happened on a link to Real Climate, which is currently headlined by this testimonial.

Some who are loathe to accept the notion that mankind's activities are altering the global climate point to lower temperatures over the last few years as proof that global warming is a bunch of hooey. What this specious ‘analysis’ completely neglects to take into account is that the last few years have been an ebb period in the solar cycle. In fact 2008 and 2009 were two of the three lowest years in the last century for the amount of energy received by Earth from the sun, and we should expect that future such ebbs in the solar cycle won't, on average, be as deep as the one we're now emerging from.

And, before you join others in jumping to the conclusion that the sun is cooling off, remember that a century is a very short period in the life cycle of such a star, and that it has been both cooler and warmer in the past.

anticipation reloaded

2010-03-12T07:35:00.001-07:00

And so it continues, or begins again. Starting today you can actually commit to the purchase of an Apple iPad, for delivery or pickup on Saturday, April 3rd.

Shall you get the base model, or go for more memory, or one of the 3G models. Should you get AppleCare (2 years for $99)? How about a case? Oh, and you'll be needing a charger.

There's some apps you're sure to want too, but you'll have to wait until you actually have your new iPad in hand to get those. Patience, patience. ;-)

can't touch that

2010-03-10T06:17:00.001-07:00

In what may be the most insightful view of Apple ever, Gary Hamel's two-part post in his WSJ blog is certainly the best piece I've seen on what is so special about Apple as it is today. My hat's off to him.

our faltering, disjointed patent system, and how to begin fixing it

2010-03-04T09:57:00.001-07:00

John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, waxes long and eloquently about the Apple-HTC lawsuit, quoting Tim Bray at length, and interspersing those passages with his own comments.

My take on the situation is that Apple had to sue somebody, or risk seeing the legitimacy of their patents evaporate for failure to defend them, but even that is evidence of a broken patent system which substitutes litigation for respect.

As previously stated, I believe the protection of the rights of the inventor to be only one of two important principles behind the patent system, the other being the maximization of the rate of accumulation of knowledge and technique in the public domain, for free use by all. Clearly, we have recently erred in the direction of protecting the inventor, providing protection even for creations that should not have been patentable in the first place.

One way to quickly roll this situation back, without having to first wade through the messy detail, would be to shorten the term of all patents, both going forward and retroactively.

I propose ten years from the date of priority be made the expiration date for all protections relating to the ownership of an invention, and that only the right of creative attribution should persist beyond that term, with limits on awards for successful false claim suits.

Combining this with higher standards for the issuing of patents going forward would at least insure that the situation is simplified and dramatically improved over the next ten years.

If this proposal gains traction, you can expect the pharmaceutical industry to cry foul, and I suppose for them you might choose to start the ten year period at some later point, perhaps the date when a new drug is deemed safe for use and no longer experimental.