the broader applicability of "cell-phone technology"

Update: An article with a similar thesis was published earlier today (Tuesday, March 18th) on Robohub.

As Microsoft discovered with the Kinect, something developed for a particular context may prove very desirable in other contexts.

For example, consider the tiny cameras that are used in most cell phones, and particularly the better of these, like those used in iPhones. Despite their size, they are very capable, and they are made by the millions, taking full advantage of the economies of scale implied. Despite the rather complex design, with multiple lens elements, Apple's cost for one of these is a few dollars.

For another example, consider the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s, also fabricated by the millions. It independently tracks motion, making it unnecessary for the CPU to be powered up to handle such tasks, extending battery life while making continuous tracking more practical.

Both of these technologies would be very helpful in many robotic applications. Sure, there might be alternatives for both, but would they be as thoroughly engineered, as efficient, as compact, or produced in anything like the same numbers?

If you want to take advantage of technologies developed for a mass market, the most direct path to doing so is to make use of the actual parts used in that market. Of course, a prerequisite for doing so is that those parts be made available outside of the supply stream for the products they were developed to be part of.

OpenNI website to close

UPDATE (March 25th): A related article just appeared on Robohub.

Okay, some things are changing at PrimeSense.

According to this post on I Programmer, the OpenNI website is set to close on April 23rd, just over seven weeks from now, plenty of time for those involved to download the latest version of the SDK, which they'll want to do as I see that the version sitting on the parallel GitHub site is not the latest beta, more likely the latest stable release.

If you have another look at the OpenNI website, you'll notice that there are Windows and Linux versions of the SDK. Considering that Apple has no clear interest in supporting development of the software on these platforms, the wonder is that those versions are still there, months after their acquisition of PrimeSense, not that they have set a date for pulling the plug on the OpenNI website.

Anyone who cares to will be able to pursue development of the (necessarily forked) version of the SDK that will continue to be available through GitHub, on whatever platform they choose. Being middleware, even if Apple were to cut off the supply of PrimeSense chips, OpenNI will continue to have value as it should be possible to make it work with other sensing hardware.

For their part, Apple is sure to make a derivative version of the SDK available through their iOS and/or OSX frameworks (eventually both, undoubtedly), as part of some future version of Xcode.

In my view, Apple's enlightened self-interest would dictate that they should continue to make PrimeSense chips available, not the latest designs of course, but about two years after they first find their way into Apple products, by which time they will have been reverse-engineered by competitors multiple times anyway. If Apple can maintain a technological lead, then their two year old designs should still be competitive with current designs from competitors, especially if priced at a low multiple of the cost of production. Likewise, they could safely contribute two year old frameworks to the GitHub-hosted OpenNI project, in the certainty that in doing so they would not be giving away any secrets.

By the same reasoning it could be to Apple's benefit to make their older SoC designs available as parts – say beginning with the A4, after it has been retired from Apple's product line – and to cooperate with smaller companies seeking to incorporate those chips into microcontrollers or similar products. This would be a way of recovering residual value from the expense of developing those designs in the first place.

Chill, people! PrimeSense is still open for business.

A rumor that Apple had acquired PrimeSense (the developer of the technology found in the original Kinect), which had been making the rounds for months, was finally publicly confirmed in late November, less than three months ago.

Immediately following that announcement, a wave of angst regarding the availability of Kinect-like technology passed through the tech community, and anyone with a stake in that availability scrambled to find alternatives, if they hadn't already begun that search based upon rumor alone.

Apparently the general presumption is, as is often the case when a larger company (like Apple) swallows a smaller one, that PrimeSense's ongoing business would be limited to the fulfillment of existing contracts, while all assets not needed for that would be busily assimilated into and repurposed for the needs of the mothership. After all, this is what happened to PA Semi, a few years ago.

That would be a reasonable expectation, except that, to judge by its website, PrimeSense is still very much in business.

Sure, their product roadmap is likely to have been altered as a result of the acquisition, and Apple is likely to reserve the newest, hottest technology for their own use, until it's no longer the newest and hottest, but they'd be fools to shut down a revenue stream they can basically get for free, since whatever they develop for their own needs is sure to find a persistent, ready market, if made generally available as parts.

Apple would, of course, be keen to secure the advantage of being able to differentiate their products from those of their competitors, so any company in the computer, smartphone, or tablet business, or any other business Apple is about to enter, would probably find the selection limited to technology that's no longer cutting edge, and others will likely find that Apple's contract stipulates OEM use only, with a prohibition on component resale.

That would be a problem for the hobbyist market and businesses that serve it, but Apple could mitigate this by allowing small-lot retail resale.

Additionally, allowing PrimeSense to engage in wholesale distribution of older component designs could provide Apple with an outlet for disposing of any component overstock that wasn't thoroughly specific to their own products. They might even discover a nice revenue stream in the sale of their SOCs and other chips, like the M7, for use in microcontrollers.

So, while it's nice to have options, and I can't blame anyone for looking for alternatives, don't forget that PrimeSense is there, since they may still turn out to be your best option.

Woz reinforces his status as everyone's favorite buffoon

Updated, see below.

You have to wonder what's up with the Woz. My theory is that he's set himself up as Apple's foil, contributing emphasis to what makes Apple Apple through personally contrasting with it at every opportunity.

Case in point: according to Infoworld Woz actually, publicly suggested that Apple should consider building and marketing its own Android phone.

Personally, I can't imagine a quicker path to undermining everything the company stands for. Not only would such a project dilute Apple's focus on their own platform, but it would erode the market for that platform while at the same time devaluing the company's reputation for quality, through the marketing of an inherently inferior product.

And that's probably the point. In thinking through this suggestion, we are reminded why it is a nonstarter, as with so many other offhand comments regarding Apple's business model.

So the more sincere Woz is in his ranting, the better he serves as a model for all of the naysayer pundits who continue to bellow that Apple must lose its soul to preserve its success, making them all look foolish by association.

UPDATE (February 9th): It appears Woz was trolling.

Apple and the options option

Think triage. Take a collection of companies that Apple might be interested in buying and they will fall into one of three groups: 1) yes, buy it now, 2) not currently a good fit, or 3) a good business partner, but Apple would only need to buy it to keep it from falling into the hands of a competitor.

An option, for that third category, would be for Apple to acquire an option to buy each company they consider vital to their own business, so that, if a competitor were to make a (verifiably legitimate) offer to buy one of these, Apple would have the option of interdicting that purchase by matching the competitor's offer themselves, or if they elected not to do so they should at least be provided with evidence that the terms which had been presented to them were the actual terms of the competitor's purchase, and not a trumped-up figure. Moreover, if Apple decided not to accept the terms of the buyout, and the competitor backed out of the deal, the company under consideration of acquisition should refund the cost of Apple's option, unless Apple were to respond with a counter offer which they accepted.

Koreas's ‘East Germany’ and the role of China

Korea, South Korea, is at the top of its game. That's not to say that a fall is imminent, nor even on the horizon, only that their current degree of engineering prowess and economic prosperity is unprecedented and, to use an over-worn expression, world class.

The other Korea, North Korea, by contrast, is decades behind the world community in almost every respect, a situation compounded by the malnourishment of its people.

This set of circumstances is very like that which existed in Germany (then West & East Germany, respectively), just prior to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. For West Germany, reunification was initially a disruptive burden, owing to the poor economic condition of the east, but it also meant a suddenly expanded labor force sharing a common language.

In Korea reunification seems a remote possibility, at present, but a shift in the political wind in the north could change that rather quickly. And don't expect much in the way of resistance from China, since North Korea's persistent cult of the leader makes communism look worse than it otherwise would, and reunification would provide them with a more prosperous trading partner in place of the burden North Korea currently represents to them.

But the really interesting dynamic would be how the economy of Korea as a whole would benefit from reunification, through the combination of North Korean labor, which could be made far more potent by means of a little food aid, and South Korean industrial ability, which, automated as it is, can still make good use of less expensive labor.

Even more than with Germany, language would bind and lubricate Korean reunification, since the Korean language is not widely spoken outside of the peninsula and also not strongly subdivided into dialects. Even without exclusionary laws, the common language would help insure that South Korean business had special access to the North Korean labor pool.

One major question remains; can some degree of economic reunification proceed without a regime change in the north? If China were to signal that North Korea should look to its southern sister for assistance, that seeming impossibility would suddenly become a matter of how much how soon, and for China that would be a matter of shrugging off a burden.

belief in evolution not necessarily an evolutionary advantage

While acknowledging your right to disagree, for the present purpose I'm going to assume that the ‘theory of evolution’ (really more of an established principle) is essentially correct, along with all of the usual corollaries.

However, it does not follow that holding this view, however orthodox and realistically unassailable it may be, confers any evolutionary advantage whatsoever upon those who hold it. In fact the advantage, as measured by fecundity, may belong to those who hold another view, for example that humans have existed in our present form since the beginning of time, a view that approximately one third of Americans espouse. (Pew Research via Reuters)

While there are practical limits on how far one's internal model of the world may diverge from reality without negative repercussions upon one's chances for contributing to the gene pool of the future, social cohesion probably matters more than accuracy in something as esoteric as the origin of the human species. If access to resources depends in any tangible way upon echoing the views of those around you, however erroneous, voicing disagreement is likely to prove counterproductive, in terms of natural selection, even when your view is correct and theirs is not – perhaps especially then.

Nor should there be anything surprising about this. Science is a relatively young phenomenon. For most of the time since the emergence of humanity, we have dealt with our own unknown origins by telling stories, frequently quite fanciful stories involving magical beings, also frequently transforming those stories into dogma as some groups became dominant and others subservient. The need for some explanation, even if a vacuous one, might be considered a defining characteristic of the human species, as distinguished from chimps, for example, who lack complex language and presumably therefore also lack the need for explanations regarding questions they lack the capacity to pose, much less to contemplate at length.

And so we still do, traffic in stories that is. For most of us, most of what we know is composed, not of data and analysis, but of stories, sometimes based on data and analysis, more often not, or at least not directly so. Even so, the majority of us have had enough exposure to science to recognize reliable methods and reasonable conclusions, and make use of that general familiarity in filtering the stories to which we are exposed.

The lingering question is whether we should be concerned over higher rates of childbirth among people whose story filters are less well developed. Is there a risk of resultant devolution? Perhaps, if it were to persist for another few thousand years, but cultural evolution is happening far more quickly and there are far more pressing issues to worry about. We do, however, need to continue to put effort into bridging the gap between scientific methods and popular beliefs, working to improve everyone's story filters.

Public Domain Day 2014

Today is Public Domain Day 2014. (Follow the link to learn more about Public Domain Day and the current state of copyright law.)

To be brief, government has no natural interest in protecting intellectual property of any sort unless doing so results in an improvement in the volume, quality, and/or relevance (largely a function of timeliness) of material passing into the public domain.

government exists to support the best instincts and constrain the worst instincts of the citizenry

Collective action is a great thing when the action involved is well considered, and in such cases the involvement of government in some capacity is frequently appropriate.

Mob-like action, on the other hand, demands an altogether different sort of involvement from government, even when it occurs on the floor of a stock exchange or in the executive offices of America's largest coroporations.

One of central myths of our society is that "greed is good" (so long as you play by the rules in pursuing it), that, on balance, it results in more benefit than damage generally. While this may seem an iffy proposition, it's one that most of us have more or less agreed to provisionally pretend is true, so government comes down on the side of supporting a little greed here and there, with the details depending significantly upon which party is in power at the moment, and only constraining cases where it's clearly gone over the top, again with the details being party-dependent. So long as government doesn't become either too much a matter of providing favors to friends and allies, or too negligent, this is actually a passably workable situation.

The predicament we find ourselves in at the moment, is that we have been sold the notion that greed without limit or concomitant responsibility is good, combined with the notion that the aspiration to flatten the distribution of income and wealth is some sort of social disease.

What worries me in the discussion about the secret operation of agencies such as the NSA, is the possibility that they might view their role as serving this twisted version of American values.

We are too big and interconnected a society, with far too much momentum, to rely upon revolution as a remedy for a government gone Tory. We must make our institutions work properly.

right to privacy inversely proportional to the impact on others (or the planet) of one's actions

The more one's choices affect others, the more they are the business of others.

The more one's choices affect the planet, including issues such as diffuse pollution, degradation of biodiversity, paving over arable land, and so forth, the more they are everyone's business.

So in matters involving either widespread or deep impact on others or the planet, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.