Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2010

The revolution is almost complete . . . hold on tight

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Charles Stross thinks he understands why Steve Jobs won’t allow Adobe Flash on to the iPhone and iPad:

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why . . .

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn’t need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It’s about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

[. . .]

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Read the whole thing. I don’t see any obvious flaw in his line of thought. It may not happen the way he predicts, but it is consistent with what we know, and it should frighten the heck out of Apple’s competitors.

Favre’s ankle still not recovered from NFC Championship game

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

For a second year in a row, Brett Favre will have to consider surgery in order to play in the coming season. Ed Werder has the details:

Favre, who would turn 41 during the 2010 season, told ESPN the ankle injury that he suffered three months ago in the NFC Championship Game against the New Orleans Saints continues to be swollen and painful.

That prompted tests to determine why healing had not occurred and Favre sent the results of those scans to orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Andrews, who told the quarterback his opinion that surgery is unavoidable.

“We have spoken,” Favre said in an e-mail. “To play again, I would need the surgery, as I suspected. This decision would be easy if not for my teammates and the fans and the entire Vikings staff. One year truly felt like 10 — much like Green Bay for many years. That’s what I was missing in my heart I suppose, a sense of belonging.”

Favre said he must determine whether his affection for the Vikings and his belief they are capable of winning the Super Bowl overrides his disdain for surgery.

Of course, the Vikings may have their quarterback of the future in Ryan Perrilloux . . .

Training to fight lower-tech aircraft in the air

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

Strategy Page rounds up information on US Navy efforts to keep their air-to-air combat skills fresh:

The U.S. Navy has refurbished a surplus U.S. Air Force National Guard F-16 flight simulator to help keep its F-16 pilots in shape for using F-16s to train navy pilots (in F-18s) how to best deal with Chinese, and other potential enemy, pilots. The navy uses F-16s because these aircraft are best able to replicate the performance of likely high end enemy fighters. That’s because Russia and China have used the F-16 as the model for most of their latest fighters (the Russian MiG-29 and Chinese J-10). The navy bought 26 of a special model (F-16N) of the aircraft in the late 1980s. But in the 1990s, the navy retired its F-16Ns, because of metal fatigue, and had to wait nearly a decade before it got sixteen more. The refurbished simulator had its cockpit modified to reflect the one the navy F-16s use.

The navy also uses F-5s to simulate lower performance enemy fighters. Two years ago, the navy completed a six year effort to buy and modify 44 F-5E fighters from Switzerland. The U.S. uses F-5s, a 12 ton fighter roughly similar to the MiG-21. The F-5 is normally armed with two 20mm cannon, and three tons of missiles and bombs. The U.S. Navy modified and refurbished the Swiss F-5s so their performance better matched that of Russian or Chinese aircraft.

It may sound odd to have older equipment still in service, but they are very useful for training purposes. Both the air force and the army will perform better if they’ve trained against the kind of equipment and tactics used by likely opponents, and it’s unlikely that you can arrange a “friendly” wargame exercise against a force you may be fighting for real in the near future.

The other thing is that the troops playing the “other side” in wargame exercises tend to have a lot more fun doing so . . .

QotD: A notable unintended consequence

Filed under: Economics, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.

Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.

Brian Micklethwait, “On the unintended consequences of President Obama”, Samizdata, 2010-04-28

European map, rationalized

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

The Economist would like to redraw the map of Europe:

People who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could. Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.

Britain, which after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores. (If the journey proves a bumpy one, it might be a good opportunity to make Wales and Scotland into separate islands).

In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.

April 29, 2010

Sudden uptick in Guild Wars 2 information releases

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:10

The nice folks who published Guild Wars five years ago are now preparing Guild Wars 2 for release . . . sometime. No firm release date has yet been revealed. This week, however, has seen a lot of new information released about the upcoming game, including:

  • Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto by Mike O’Brien, one of the company founders.
    “So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.”
  • The first confirmed profession in GW2, the Elementalist. One of the eight professions in the new game (there are ten in GW, so we’re definitely losing at least two of the current ones). Victor’s favourite GW character is his Elementalist. He’s looking forward to finding how the character class has been changed in the new game.
  • Some quite substantial changes to the combat system from what we’re used to in GW: Combat, Part 1: Skills and Combat, Part 2: Weapons, Professions and Races. It sounds like the changes are going to make the combat experience a whole lot more interesting (possibly harder to master, but definitely more interesting).
  • Five Years in Tyria by James Phinney, a brief tribute to GW on its fifth anniversary.

Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be fiction authors

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Charles Stross lays out the miserable truth about the practical issues when you try to write fiction for a living:

Most people have a very romanticized view of what it is that authors do. Firstly, there’s a widespread perception that the workload involved is relatively easy — in modern western nations, the level of functional literacy is high enough that a majority of the population can read a book, and write (at least to the extent of thumbing a 160-character text message on their phone). Because there is no obvious barrier to entry as with music (where proficiency with musical instruments clearly takes practice), most people assume that writing a novel is like writing a text message — you put one word in front of another until you’re done. The skills of fiction composition are largely invisible, until you try to actually do it. Secondly, many people harbour peculiar ideas about how much money there is in commercial publishing — and when disabused of the idea that selling a first novel is a road to riches, they assume it’s because the evil publishers are conspiring to keep all the money to themselves (rather than the unpalatable truth — publishing commercial fiction is hard work for little reward). Finally, there’s the Lifestyle chimera.

In short: it’s actually work to write for a living. The pay sucks for the vast majority of fiction writers. You face all the risks of a start-up business, but the potential pay-off is lottery-odds unlikely to come your way. Unlike other work, creative writing can’t be done (for most authors) in a predictable regular way:

Putting words in a row is wearying work. When they’re flowing fast, I can sometimes reach a dizzying peak output of 2000 words per hour for a couple of hours — not in fiction, but in a blog entry or a non-fiction essay. I’ve occasionally had death march sessions in which I pumped out as much as 10,000 words in a day. But such Stakhanovite output isn’t sustainable; a 10,000 word day is usually followed by a three-day-weekend to recover from it. A more realistic target for a full-time professional writer is 500-1000 words of finished prose per workday, corresponding to about 1-2 hours of writing, 2-4 hours of polishing, and another couple of hours of thinking about what they want to say, and how to say it. Like anyone else, they need weekends and vacation weeks and time to do the housekeeping. 1000 words per day for a 250-day working year (50 weeks of 5 days a week) works out at 250,000 words per year — or two 320 page novels.

There’s one SF/Fantasy author who seems to publish a new book every month, but he’s extremely unusual. For most authors, one or two books per year is pretty good output.

More wineries to screw it up, er, I mean “on”

Filed under: Economics, Science, Wine — Nicholas @ 12:17

The debate over wine bottle seals may not be quite over, but the evidence is mounting that modern screw-top closures (PDF document) are going to win out over traditional cork and modern synthetic cork closures:

The image above shows the state of 14 bottles of white wine sealed under various closures 125 months (just over 10
years) after bottling. This closure trial was conducted by the Australian Wine Research Institute to assess the relative
effects of cork, plastic and screw cap closures on bottle-aged wine and has unequivocally shown the superiority of
screw caps in aging wine.

[. . .]

The bottled wines were systematically analyzed over a 10 year period by sensory and analytical methods and
photographed (you can see the sequential photographs below). The bottle sealed with a screw cap is positioned on the
far left. While the pictures tell a convincing story, leaving little doubt as to which seal provides the most effective
method of preserving a wine, it is the sensory evaluation results that are most revealing. The wines sealed under screw
cap were still drinkable and showing appealing secondary aged characters while retaining freshness.

In spite of the obvious colour differences, those bottles all hold the same wine, from the same vintage. The bottle at the far right has darkened quite significantly and there’s quite a lot of sediment accumulated at the bottom of the bottle. Just looking at it, you’re probably correct to say it’s dead — don’t even bother uncorking it.

H/T to Michael Pinkus for the link.

Did Bruno Ganz do too good a job playing Adolf Hitler?

Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Now that you actually have to work at it to find some of the Downfall parodies on YouTube, John Naughton looks at the cultural power of remix culture, which has been most recently popularized by Bruno Ganz in his mesmerizing performance as Adolf Hitler:

Ganz’s performance is a real tour de force, so much so that the New Yorker critic wondered aloud if it would have the effect of humanising Hitler. But the scene had another, equally extraordinary, side-effect. It became the basis for a wildly successful and entertaining comic virus, in which people used everyday video-editing software to remix the scene in modern contexts (politics, sports, technology, popular culture). The German soundtrack was left unchanged, but new subtitles were added and then the results were posted on YouTube.

[. . .]

Some of these parodies are tiresome. But many are side-splittingly funny, a testimony to the power of remixing as a way of enlivening cultural life. Nevertheless, not everyone is delighted by this new art form. Jewish organisations have been understandably disturbed by the way the architect of the Holocaust has been turned into a comic turn. “Hitler,” said the director of the Anti-Defamation League, “is not a cartoon character”.

[. . .]

The YouTube remix culture is thus a new take on a venerable tradition. I wouldn’t argue that the Downfall spoofs are high art, but they are evidence of bottom-up creativity and intelligence in a new medium. And if we allow narrow considerations of intellectual property to stifle this creativity, then we may all, except for the lawyers, live to regret it.

Back to 1996

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:07

BoingBoing linked to this online time machine, which shows you what your website would look like (and sound like) back in 1996:

Presenting Geocities-izer!

All the spin that’s fit to print: Bigotgate

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:52

After British PM Gordon Brown accidentally threw himself into the political woodchipper with a remark about a “bigoted woman”, the spin doctors are having a time with it:

Matthew Taylor, former chief adviser on political strategy to Tony Blair

“It is clearly disastrous and also a terrible thing to happen before the final leaders’ debate, which Gordon Brown has to win. He’s given Clegg and Cameron ammunition. The only thing is that expectations now will be so low. They won’t be on the floor, they will be in the cellar. Rock bottom. He’ll have to pull off the performance of the century.”

Olly Grender, former director of communications for the Lib Dems:

“This is the second electric moment in the campaign, the first being the first leaders’ debate. It is going to dominate every news bulletin and will be trailed particularly by the rightwing media. It was classic Gordon Brown, speaking to somebody, giving her a list of six things without asking her anything.

[. . .]

Iain Dale, Conservative political commentator and former political lobbyist

“I can’t remember any politician doing anything this crass. We’ve had this sort of thing before. Who would have thought that when Prescott punched someone it would do his reputation good? But he called a 66-year-old woman a bigot. If we call anyone a bigot who mentions immigration, then that covers thousands of people.

[. . .]

Charlie Whelan, former press secretary for Gordon Brown

“It’s all media clatter rubbish. What makes this story exciting is the media are involved. You’ve got human interest, then you fling in the media and, hey bingo: the wonderful moment the media have been looking for. It’s wonderful to talk about it and to Twitter about it, but normal people looking at it don’t see it in the same way.

Actually, Whelan may have the right idea: the whole situation has galvanized the British media, but it’s not yet clear if it will cause anything more than a temporary blip on the radar as far as the actual voting public is concerned.

All the Senate’s a stage, and Goldman Sachs merely a player

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:19

Although in this case, it’s the Senators as walking shadows, poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then (if we’re lucky) are heard no more. Megan McArdle isn’t impressed:

The statements from the Senators make it clear that they are not holding this hearing in order to find out what happened; that’s the SEC’s job. They’re holding this hearing in order to be televised yelling at investment bankers. Claire McCaskill’s rant was particularly irrelevant to the actual question at hand, but all of them are mostly trying to express outrage, not make any coherent assessment of the strengths of the SEC’s case.

April 28, 2010

Sorry for the lack of bloggishness

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:46

Today was a triple-whammy of first-thing-in-the-morning dentist appointment, followed by a meeting with my accountant, then a trip to the bank to open a vein pay my 2009 personal and business taxes. That left no time for more pleasant activities like blogging.

Regular blogging may resume later today.

April 27, 2010

Further evidence that PowerPoint is the tool of Satan

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:09

DarkWater Muse sent me the following link, saying “Finally somebody who sympathizes with my long held views on PowerPoint”:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

[. . .]

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

[. . .]

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

One of the worst aspects of any PowerPoint presentation is that by the use of graphic tricks and pretty effects, serious flaws in actual content can be “handwaved over”. This is great for the presenter who doesn’t want to impart real information, but terrible for the victims audience. Bulleted lists are a useful device for summarizing key ideas that don’t necessarily have a hard sequence or hierarchy, but they can also be used to imply illogical or inconsistent groupings of concepts or facts, especially when the eye (and the mind) is being entranced by whizzy tricks.

To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby, “a good Civil Servant must be able to use PowerPoint not as a window into the mind but as a curtain to draw across it.”

I’ve sounded the warning call about the evil incarnate that is PowerPoint before. Do have a look at the (yes, I recognize the irony) slideshow here.

Update, 30 April: PowerPoint badges for your BDUs.

QotD: The NFL draft is like a lottery

Filed under: Football, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

Forty-yard dash numbers analyzed to the hundredths of seconds . . . elaborate, heated debates about what round a player “should” be chosen in . . . hours spent viewing film of men in underwear racing around cones. Mysterious lingo: Corey Chavous of NFL Network praised one player during draft weekend for “hip explosion,” Todd McShay of ESPN said another prospect was “tight in the upper chest.” Tim Tebow drafted before Jimmy Clausen — that can’t be right, contact the National Academy of Sciences!

Fascination with the NFL draft is plenty nutty, but the zaniest aspect of this event is the pretense — shared by NFL scouts, draftniks and spectators alike — that drafting is a science. Stare at enough film, click enough stopwatches and you’ll be able to determine who “should” be drafted in what round.

NFL scouts and media draftniks have a self-interest stake in maintaining this illusion, because it makes them seem the possessors of incredible insider information. But in truth, NFL draft choices are like lottery tickets. They may succeed. They may bust. The buyer has no clue what’s going to happen, just like the buyer of a lottery ticket.

Gregg Easterbrook, “Is the NFL draft science or lottery?”, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, 2010-04-27

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress