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Apples iEmpire

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I’m sure what I’m going to say has been said before, I intimated it the other day for that matter, but Steven Jobs left Apple with an iMpire (i Empire) that no one has been able to keep up with. One way of seeing his legacy, the way he and others may have seen it was as the tools required to interact with the world of data.

Our world (in the metaphysical sense) started out as a place of brute physicality. As society developed and technology humans began to plan, and then we began to record information remote from our brains, and then ideas and concepts, some of them completely disassociated from the physical world we lived in. Some people began to ‘live in their head’ could do so without getting eaten or starving because society could afford to support them, and even awarded them for some of the things they could bring forth (art, science, technology in the abstract.)

This evolution has continued to the point where a large part of our world has become intellectual, it is now a world of data that can only be accessed with the right tools. But this world is not a static one where you just look in and pull out what you want, there is a vast amount of creation and manipulation required. But this requires a set of tools that provide mirror simple access to the world of data. Mirror simple, because all you need to do with a mirror is hanging it up and look into it and it does its job. If technology requires you to carry out arcane incantations and hand motions to provide access to the data world then its to some extent impeding you.

Look at it another way, there is ongoing work in the DoD that eventually will allow a pilot to look around and see the world outside the cockpit as if the aircraft were not there. We need the inverse, the ability to peer into the data world and do what we need, from any point at any time, for an uncountable multitude of reasons…

On the Go Data Access + Comms

iPad (Fire hose of access, lite content creator, iPhone in chief?)
iPhone
iPod, Touch (can we see this as the low end iPhone) Nano (does this eventually become the iPhone Nano, the iWatch….which it already is, almost)

The Links

Commercial Front End

ITunes
AppStore

The Linking memory

iCloud

Content Creation

Mac
Mac Mini (beginner)
MacBooks
AirBook (on the go content creation, iPad with keyboard)

Home Data Center, access heavy, creation light

Apple TV
Mac Mini
iPad

So Apple as a complete iCology now; the problem is that we really need the rest of the tech world to catch up.

The Gov’t is here to help…relieve you of your (fill in the blank)

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

This Forbes piece is in violent agreement with yesterday’s post. I guess more and more people see the problem the way I do…though I don’t think the gentlemanly solution is going to get us where we need to be, but might keep the problem from getting as bad as quickly in the future when the people have taken their eye off the ball to deal with other important issues.

Why 5 Years?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

‘Musk has a great point.’ when doing projections, part of my job, I know that I ‘should’ be able to project a couple of years into the future with at least some expectation of being close, but after 18 months you know it’ll be wrong. You can forecast five years out in general terms based on ‘momentum’ but you know that all you are doing is a version of ‘Moores Law’ which is more a market roadmap than anything else. This is more about tech-base support than anything else, and a form of jobs program, one that is needed at some level. But maybe a bit more flexible approach can be found.

Not saying ULA is doing anything wrong, this is just old style mindsets setting policy.

Be Here Now

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

How did we get here? Why is this happening now?

The Here and Now is a phonograph needle tracking the wobbles in the groove that all our yesterdays laid down.

Is there a way out?

There is only foreward there is no going back.

There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature. (From)

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Mrs. George William Fairfax, Sep. 12, 1758

Not sure I agree at an individual level all the time, but on the aggregate in the immediate time frame I would. Perhaps its like this: Science tells me that most of my actions are planned a significant fraction of a second ahead of my consciousness recognizing what is going on. It is impossible to change what you do not know is coming but if you plan ahead you can control what happens at a future point in time and space.

And what we do individually and locally does matter nationally and globally, at least a little and if not now then sometime in the future.

Does that mean I demand “Word Gov’t Now!” how stupid do you think I am?

We need more self-control, personal control, local control and less regional control, national control and global control. We do need norms and some way of enforcing them for such things as : life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and such easily debased things as contract enforcement, property rights, ecological cost accounting, financial cost accounting…a few others…maybe

But….the old bureaucratic model, relying on a plethora of relatively well paid trustworthy functionaries to enforce norms is becoming unaffordable.

Laissez-Faire – let it be – management doesn’t work, it doesn’t work in regulation either.

Why has the US Constitution remained important for more than 200 years? Because its simple, basic, lays out fundamentals and leaves the rest for interpretation but by being fairly simple, constrained and pragmatic it is actually possible to interpret it to cover very large sets of cases.

We have to get over the belief that you can make life perfect if you can just tune your laws/regulations/rules just right and get the humans out-of-the-way. We used to know better, I think that most scholars know better. But somehow many folks have come to believe that if not all, then the one specific law they care about can be perfected, and since they care about it passionately they push it forward, usually through a system that has no time to really understand the consequences of this law when combined with that law and this social reality, etc. And with each law becoming more complex because of fiddling to tune it to perfection, the way they interact becomes utterly unknowable. And the law becomes harder to obey and easier for smart lawyers to subvert.

So….

So where do we go from here?

Start to build down the complexity we have built up at every level, what about:

For every new rule, two old ones have to be eliminated and no double dipping?
Limit the length of any law/rule/regulation to two double-sided 8 1/2 by 11 sheets one inch margins typed in 11 point Times New Roman with the option of an extra sheet of readable graphics?
Eliminate mandatory this, no tolerance that, rules that have become a pox on our society?
Make Judges accountable to other Judges and the Bar with impeachment by the people an option?

You can think of more, I know you can!

Cheers

NaNoWriMo Post something or other: Five and the Base

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Five opened here eyes and looked at the base spread out across the grays and browns of the asteroidal body it had been planted in. She didn’t know which base it was, she was fairly certain that it was one she hadn’t seen before.

“We are shedding the kids Commander.” Mother said in Five’s head. A glance showed the twenty roughly similar pieces of rubble that had trailed behind the slightly ovoid blob that was Watcher Sixty five thousand, five hundred and sixty-five were diverging and forming up to make their way into the repair and update bay.

Five looked back at the base. she was looking into the side, though at first glance it was like a city of tall skyscrapers seen from directly above, all sharp edges and spires poking out of the asteroidal body. The gravity generator spikes speared ‘down’ from the asteroid. Mother and Five continued towards the ‘sky scrapers.’ as Five wondered where the word skyscraper had come from, it tasted familiar, but it elicited no definition tag from the tac glossary.

Mother’s target was now very obviously the ‘bottom’ of the structure, dark blocks with massive lattice structures between above and around them. That was the BlankBank, like every BlankBank in every other base. There Five would find her sisters and be able to exercise, eat maybe, think, even sleep, “Perchance to Dream?” a voice not her own or Mother’s seemed to whisper.

“Uh, Mother?””

“Yes dear?”

“Uh did you, hear something?”

“No dear.”

They were both silent during final approach. From what Five could see there were at least ten other Watchers docked. That seemed a lot and if each of the Banks had the same number that would be a Hundred at this base alone, and several thousand more out on their long looping patrol orbits. Seven minutes later Mother entered a bay and docking arms reached out to snag the camouflaged fighter. Continue reading →

Moon Base Tovarich

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

“If it turns out that the Moon has a number of caves that can provide some protection from radiation and meteor showers, it could be an even more interesting destination than previously thought,” said veteran cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, quoted in an article by Reuters.”

Damn! I wish I’d known this when I was writing “Moon Dreams!”

iPad, BeBot, Pandora and the ‘tech’ industry

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Jobs Motto

So I haven’t said much about my constant companion, the iPad, recently.

I updated to iOS5 the day it released, of course on an Orig, it’s not the same as it probably is on a 2 but it’s still good. I think iCloud’s (base) is going to work out well and the iMessage etc look interesting. The tabs in Safari took a few hours to get used to but they are an improvement.
Other than a pretty good hand holding experience during set up I haven’t had much ‘contact’ with the new. Which in my experience is actually a good thing. I may be a fantasist and romantic but I’m als a bit of a stick in the mud, if something works, why change it for the sake of change?
Biggest headache was having to update what seemed like umpteen Apps but as usual it happened pretty seamlessly.
My biggest iPad laugh was taking it(them actually) to my sister in-law’s and I think her little grand son(4?) whose had an iPad longer than I have, flipped the selector switch on the side of my wife’s iPad, muting it. It took me an HOUR and several hard boots and harder words, to figure out the poor thing was doing what it was told, I just didn’t understand.
So at the same meeting of iPad carriers, we were introduced to BeBot, a simply wonderful time sink, and maybe the closest thing to a new instrument I have seen in a long time. It’s just an App but it turns the iPad into a synthesizer with a pure touch interface, you run your finger(s) over the screen to make synth music. Quite a few interesting base options and lots of ways to vary them. I could see someone becoming a professional BeBotist in the future, or BeBot Groups getting together. It’s currently only an instrument, it does not record, I hope they come out with a version which lets you ‘lay tracks’ etc.
Pandora, the phenomenon, I listen to little else these days, on my iPad or laptop. I have found music that I love, that I had never heard or been able to follow up on before. This is by far the best way to listen to music. As I have said elsewhere, the fact that I cannot absolutely control what I am listening to but can make my opinion ‘heard’ is simply a phenomenal breakthrough in listening pleasure.

And so to the Tech industry, who is finally settling into a funk over the dominance of Apple, iOS, the iPad, and to some extent the death and ascencion to TechSaintHood of Steve Job’s (that’s a comment on others, not a slam at Mr.Jobs who was as human as they come but the right gifted man at the right pivots of [tech] history.)

It seems to me that anyone out there who looks at the industry with a reasonably open mind will see that pervasive lacks have impaired broad swaths of the industry

originality
innovative risk taking
long-range vision
middle distant financial horizons.

Jobs seems to have recognized these things and was able to use Apple and the experience he gained while in the wilderness to build a product platform + family + business-model that others seem unable or perhaps unwilling to compete with.

Most fundamental to the paralysis is item 4 above with a lot of 3 in support. Jobs was able to keep building his model over a long period of relatively lack luster performance. He was lucky, in that no one really expected great things of Apple but it had a dedicated customer base and no one in a place to counter or make use of the knowledge understood what he was doing till it was too late. He was cagey and secretive, probably because that was just the way he was, but also because he knew that if some of his business partners understood what he wanted to do and came to believe in it like he did, he’d probably have a harder time making enough money to keep the project going when he needed cash flow to push some of the concepts forward. He was also like most visionaries and his understanding of his own vision evolved and developed detail over time. And of course, no one else knew what they should be watching for.

So now we have people talking up Amazon’s Fire as a competitor. Why, because its Amazon and Amazon had the Kindle. I’m not sure but I think they miss the point. The Kindle was the front end of a digital book store. The Nook showed that with color and the right price you could have a bit more than that. The Fire is a shopping window and digital sales point for Amazon, yes it’s also a reader and a tablet, but its main purpose is as a shop window.

The iPad is a more general purpose tool than Fire. IPad is part of a larger tech infrastructure from the iPod Touch to the top of the line Mac workstations. This is essentially an intellectual interface infrastructure for creation and consumption, with a powerful shopping window built in. The Fire is never going to compete with that. And neither is the Android platform by the way.

Android is like Linux it has a good chance of lasting a long time because it is widely dispersed and open for people to build on and use. It is also likely to be very important, but as an also ran competitor in all but the phone space, where in some senses it may already dominates because of the variety of companies and price points it supports.

So is this bad….yes because Apple is not going to be able to carry the ball forever and maybe not for very long unless Jobs trained his heirs well and left them with the tools to control the kingdom. It’s bad because competition is good within reason and no one is competing with Apple at the moment which will weaken them eventually The competion seem to be in a ‘waiting out the deluge’ mode. Waiting for Apple to stumble giving them the opportunity to pull it down to their own level. if (when) that happens then the leaps we have seen recently may end as the industry falls back into the frothy stagnation it suffered from the later nineties to mid noughts.

Lets hope not….

Move along, nothing original to see here…. but maybe some interesting links..

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

As Russel Mead at Via Meadia writes to great effect the Great Loon, the Duck of Death is dead.

And here is Russel Mead’s interesting take on protests etc. A very insightful piece that hit home once more regarding something that puzzled me… ” There was a time long ago when political protest really mattered. The Vietnam protests didn’t end the war (and didn’t keep Nixon from carrying 49 states against George McGovern in 1972), but they helped end the draft. The civil rights movement led to some of the most profound social changes this country has ever seen. Before that, there were labor and suffragette marches…” ” But these days the old style protests remind me of political conventions: empty and pointless (though noisy and publicized) rituals. “ And he draws a comparison to the conventions. Once the conventions were important, before mass media and instant communications, but now they are just rituals the politic druidic class still hold. In the old days a mass rally meant something, life for the working class was twice todays and wages closer to subsistence, and brutality was expected of the police, going to a rally meant something. Today it’s not much more than a smelly holiday. Not to say that there aren’t some grievances and suffering…but OWS is more theater than struggle. And then Amity Shales had this to say about what these folks want, vs what they need.

I am never going to be the blog-media-news miner that Instapundit is. Here is the latest on the SLS fiasco from Rand Simberg, the Space Launch System is a works program, yes well paid and aerospace is effective economic multiplier but the money could be spent to so much better effect!

(edits, still not getting all of this right the first time)

What is the meaning of the word Customer?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

cus·tom·er /ˈkʌstəmər/ noun

a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron
Informal. a person one has to deal with: a tough customer; a cool customer.

From dictionary.com

Origin: 1400–50; late Middle English; see custom, -er1; compare Middle English customercollector of customs < Anglo-French; Old French costumier,cognate with Medieval Latin custumārius;see customary

American Psychological Association (APA):

Customer. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved October 19, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Customer

Chicago Manual Style (CMS):

Customer. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Customer (accessed: October 19, 2011).

Modern Language Association (MLA):

“Customer.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 19 Oct. 2011. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Customer>.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE):

Dictionary.com, “Customer,” in Dictionary.com Unabridged. Source location: Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Customer. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: October 19, 2011.

BibTeX Bibliography Style (BibTeX)

@article {Dictionary.com2011,
    title = {Dictionary.com Unabridged},
    month = {Oct},
    day = {19},
    year = {2011},
    url = {http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Customer},
}

OK?

So I have a discussion about this word with someone, they insist that when it is used in company documents the word customer means the corporate entity the counter party (other person) represents and not that person, and moreover that at work I am representing the company not myself.

The word corporation ( ˌkɔrpəˈreɪʃən/ [kawr-puh–rey-shuhn] noun :an association of individuals, created by law or under authority of law, having a continuous existence independent of the existences of its members, and powers and liabilities distinct from those of its members.) is clearly a person in the eyes of the law.

So I get that we have caught bureaucrati-itis or tech-speak-itis from lawyers and MBAs and use the noun ‘Customer’ when referring to the organization/people we do business with. The use of the word Customer is a reasonable short hand personalizing while generalizing the business relationship vice the more functional terms of buyer, contractor, purchaser, user, etc. And its also obvious that I represent the company not myself when on company time and talking business.

But when I read a direction that says Customer I assume that this means the person and company since one or both could be within the meaning of the word. The word is singular and while intellectually I realize a Corporation is a person and the person I speak with only represents that company there is clearly good reason to think that the intent of the instruction is aimed at the person and company.

In fact in business development we are supposed to know both the company and its stated goals / objectives and the person/people we interlocute with because it’s critical to building a relationship. In fact we always speak of the customer as the person @ the company when getting down to details and putting plans together.

So why is it that when I suggest that at the point of direction we use the word company (which was the intent of the direction) and not customer (which I think could mean the company or the person or both) do I get crap?

Is it because the word is the safe lawyer one? Is it that the processes we are so proud of mainly aimed at covering the company’s and maybe the bureaucrats ass rather than being easy to use/understand? Is it also possible that they understand that ambiguity is in fact in the interests of some folks because it provides more opportunities to pin a scapegoat if something goes south?

Sorry a long a wordy rant on a stupid topic I know.

But I hate it when I hit a walll when I’m quite willing to accept the other persons viewpoint as valid while they see my point of view as stupid/invalid/worthless. I don’t like being any of those things….though I’m sure I am every once in a while….but of course not on this topic.

Sigh…I still need to go and do some meditation techniques I guess, good night.

“Here’s the problem: there are no grownups. “

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I have a new hero! I love this line, maybe it was just a matter of right words at the right time on the right topic but it is perfect. Bob Krum was discussing the euro debt crisis among other things (like stupid questions on ‘presidential debates’) in Stop Waiting for Superman.

There are no grownups; there are just folks (blokes in Brit speak) like us, imperfect humans who are lucky to make a right decision (on issues more complex than whether to turn into the path of that oncoming Mack truck or not) much more than 50% of the time (and we don’t always make the right one regarding the Mack truck.)

What does that mean? Many things but one of them is that overly complex political, financial, social, technical…etc constructs are asking for problems. Stable systems are ones that are essentially self organizing, a pile of sand will settle into the same conical shape every time because its stable in its environment. Small c capitalist, old meaning liberal economies, are self organizing and stable. The euro zone is a complex web of overly constrained systems that like some cartoon Rube Goldberg steam plant is constantly threatening to blow a gasket and it requires a genius just to know where to apply the next tourniquet.

In the last few decades we have made vast strides in understanding ourselves and our world (in a thousand different dimensions.) Then we have often reacted to this increased understanding by thinking we can control more things and implementing more and more rules. The effects of those rules are often individually complex and unintended but the interactions between them is (IMHO) utterly outside of our ability to cope with. Among other things I rather suspect that every one of us (barring a newborn baby maybe) is technically a criminal, having violated at one time or another various laws, rules or regulations most of which we had no idea existed or had no way to follow.

Somehow we have become inured to the regulated world, see it as natural, but it’s probably reached its practical limits and is now in the process of imploding. We have the tools to creat a more self organized – de-bureaucratized world but have not yet quite figured out what it really looks like and how to transition from where we are to where we need to be.

Maybe that’s just wishful thinking….fueld by a frustration at the idiocy that seems to have become institutionalized in so many places. But change ‘is in the air,’ though it may still be some years away. I just hope that the transition can be made relatively peacefully, there are far too many people on this orbiting rock (7Billion!?) for a major disruption to be anything other than catastrophic for far too many.

There is no utopia waiting over the brow of the next hill, and there was never a golden age that we have somehow lost (one man’s golden age was someone elses hell.) We can’t go back to a past that never existed, and refusing to live and work today because the day after tomorrow will be better is foolish and self-destructive. Tomorrow never gets here, let alone the day after, and your vision of the world will never occupy a future today unless you work for it in the today you find yourself in. Live in the now with a vision of where you want to end up.

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