Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2010

It’s not really about market share: that’s just keeping score

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

Eric Raymond thinks a lot of people are missing the point on the ongoing iPhone-Android battle:

It’s not about whether or not Apple will be crushed. It’s not about who makes the “best” products, where “best” is measured by some interaction between the product and the speaker’s evaluation of the relative importance of various features and costs. It’s about what the next generation of personal computing platforms will be. Down one fork they’ll be open, hackable, and user-controlled. Down the other they’ll be closed, locked down, and vendor-controlled. Though there are others on each side of this struggle, in 2010 it comes down to whether Apple or Android wins the race to over 50% smartphone market share; after that point, network effects will become self-reinforcing until the next technology disruption.

If he’s right — and he very well might be — then Apple’s moderately disappointing upgrades in the newly announced iPhone 4 may have handed the long-term advantage to Google. This may be bad news for Apple shareholders, but it’ll be a long-term positive for mobile computing.

April 22, 2010

The iPad is “the ultimate Steve Jobs device”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:05

I’m still quite happy with my iPhone, although I’ll pay attention when the next annual hardware refresh is released. I don’t quite “get” the attraction of the iPad, but perhaps it’s because I’m not typically swayed by glamour. Eric Raymond is amazed, but not at the device itself. He’s amazed at how closesly it approaches the Platonic ideal of a Steve Jobs device:

The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device — so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it’s good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does. It’s a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function. The viral YouTube videos of cats and two-years-olds playing with it speak truth in their unsurpassable combination of draw-you-in cuteness with utter pointlessness. It’s the perfect lust object of postmodern consumerism, irresistibly attractive but empty — you know you’ve been played by the marketing and design but you don’t care because your complicity in the game is part of the point.

This has to be Steve Jobs’s last hurrah. I predict this not because he is aging and deathly ill, but because he can’t possibly top this. It is the ne plus ultra of where he has been going ever since the Mac in 1984, with his ever-more obsessive focus on the signifiers of product-design attractiveness. And it’s going to make Apple a huge crapload of money, no question.

Sorta related, from BoingBoing:

March 5, 2010

QotD: Rescuing science from the AGW disaster

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

. . . this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don’t want creationists to get traction, you can’t just treat this as someone else’s problem. You have to clean house. You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.

A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.

These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head. But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community’s failure to insist on them sooner. Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.

Eric S. Raymond, “Lies and consequences”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-03-04

February 12, 2010

Eric Raymond finally “gets” the Vikings

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

I’m just as happy that my area didn’t receive any of the snow that’s been blanketing areas to the south of us. Eric Raymond wasn’t as lucky:

Now I understand the Viking Era
So I’m sitting here, looking out my window at the 3-foot snow and the 5-foot icicles, reverting to ancestral type. Thinking:

“Fuck this. Let’s go sack Miklagard.”

And Ken Burnside points out even more opportunity for enriching historical knowledge:

The reason why Minnesota and Wisconsin were settled by Norwege and Swenske isn’t because the other cultures couldn’t hack the winters.

It’s because compared to 19th century Norway and Sweden, Upper Minneosta and Upper Wisconsin are *paradise*.

“Look! Farmland! Lakes for fishing! Timber and lumber to build from! And no morass of petty aristocracy to tell you no. And, hey, it only snows for five whole months here! They won’t believe THAT back in the old country!”

The only reason there weren’t more of them was because a lot of Norski STILL remember the marketing flimflam that was Greenland. They had a completely justified 900 year old mistrust of ANYONE telling them about ‘great farmland, only snows for five months of the year, plenty of timber…’

October 14, 2009

Disturbing historical pattern

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

Eric S. Raymond poses an uncomfortable question:

A few moments ago, I read a review of a new book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, and the following sentences jumped out at me:

This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons.

I found myself wondering “And this differs from our political class . . . how?”

The U.S.’s very own nomenklatura, our permanent political class and its parasitic allies, has been on a borrowing binge since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Just like the pre-1989 Communist elites, they’ve been piling up debt in order to buy the consent of the governed with ever-more-generous entitlement programs. It took another twenty years, but the insolvency of California is bringing those chickens home to roost here as well. With the CBO now projecting that Social Security will go cash-flow-negative next year, an equally cataclysmic collapse of the federal government’s finances won’t be long in coming — in fact, I now give it over 50% odds of happening before Obama’s first term ends in 2012.

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