Post a Day Challenge

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Guess I was supposed to blog that I was taking part in the Post a day challenge 2011. But see I’m an engineer I only read the instructions later.

Of course one thing that will make this possible is my iPad and the WP editing tool for it.

Cheers all

Editing Writing with an iPad

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I am here tonight to admit in front of you all that I am an addict. An iPad addict. I to have been assimilated into the great collective.

I read the Economist, Aviation Week and Space Technology, and more on it, follow the news and blogs. I watch shows, read books, play games, stay in (calendar) synch with my wife on it. But it’s not just because it’s the uber net to brain link, though that plays it’s part, that I am so addicted.

Despite what S.Jobs and others have said the iPad is a content creating platform, it’s just not a Mac or PC. For some jobs it is awkward and it does change how I express myself, writing and editing are harder and I tend to be ‘flatter’ less expressive but that’s not always bad I do have a tendency to be too flowery even repetitive if unconstrained (and use too many big words.). For art/picture creation it is a revelation. And it enables creation in places I have not been able to create in before, primarily on travel for my work because carrying 2 laptops is (for me) not an acceptable option.

I have created the covers to both my novels, one published the other upcoming, on my iPad and am happy with both, here’s the upcoming one the other is Moon Dreams shown down a few links.

While typing on the iPad is not as fluid as it is on my ThinkPad laptop it is possible to do lying in bed one finger hunt and peck.

The iPad has had a profound impact on me and my family, hopefully generally for the better (how else could I listen to Pandora and read Instapundit while on the elliptical machine at the gym?

Dawn @ Vesta

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Vesta South Polar Region Dawn Framing Camera

The Dawn Mission is ultra cool, what’s not to love about orbiting an unexplored world. Motoring there on ion drive and planning to motor over to a new planet (minor) on your ion jet after you’ve finished with this one. This is what space exploration was supposed to be like….and it is, we just got too jaded in the mean time to understand what we are seeing. This image is from the Image of the Day.

Health Care Costs (3)

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

So to continue: The way I see Health Care has seen a bubble in the US that has grown huge over a very extended period. Most have called this ‘bubble’ Health Care Cost inflation. But a bubble over any period between inception and bursting can be seen as (mistaken for) inflation. Is the HCC “Bubble” going to burst or do we have to just accept this as inflation. I think that too many people want this to be Inflation, not a bubble. And I do not want a ‘bust’ but I do think we need to get on the off ramp, to a price plateau at the very least.

I’ve discussed:

The pernicious effect of opaque pricing
A spike in Cost/Value in capital investment (buildings and equipment.)
The Gov’t affected floor to pricing
The profit motive effect of increasing costs in the system

Now I’ll add some more:

Direct sales…more and more selling of this that or the other service, drug, wonder cure, to the general populace who have no real way of parsing the useful from the useless or even harmful. And then the sales guys got to congress and punditry and started demonizing those who tried to point out that the common man was not really in a position to make medical decisions. (Not that the god-doctors should be put in charge, much as many of them believe that they should be because they are smarter than anyone else.)
Litigation, because medical outcomes are impossible to ensure, and there has been a Lawyer bubble going on for many decades, doctors got sued more and more frequently, malpractice insurance costs went up and so another cost was added into the equation (and for a long time absorbed because the system hid the costs)
Specialization, again 9% of 10,000 is a lot more money than 10% of 5,000, but 15% of 10,000 is even more. Specialist charge at a higher rate because they are specialists and have special skills, that are needed by special cases…..they don’t have to see as many patients, get to go to conferences and consult with other wizards and look down their noses at the rest of the world, even at other doctors. What’s not to like? Just one more cost adsorbed in the system.
Administrative fief building, its a fact of nature, or rather an emergent property of human society: administrations grows more complex and adsorbs more resources as time moves on, as the top level administrators increase the number of ‘direct reports’ then create hierarchies so they don’t have to talk to as many people so they can be ‘more efficient.’ Administrators (Bureaucrats) are extremely good at capturing the system and turning it to serve them versus the customer the system is supposed to serve.

So what is the solution. Well I think you can see the one I would focus on first but that will be a discussion for another day.

Alpha Dog…next we have Wardogs…then Wargs

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Alpha Dog shown in this video is really, really neat technology but even in this early stage there is something very creepy about it. If you connect this with what we have done with the Predator drone and its cousins….one has to wonder if we have opened Pandora’s box.

I have written about Wardogs in Under Seige, a novel I wrote years ago and I will be publishing soon, and in passing about guard robots in Moon Dreams. Saberhagen had the Berserkers et.al. for decades. But one does not have to get to AI’s gone berserk for things to get out of control.

We may have paved the way to H E double toothpicks with Predators. The Chinese and Russians, as well as others, will sell just about any technology to anyone. We have the example of what tech did in the Arab Spring….is possibly doing in Syria. What happens when the bad guys don’t have to risk their lives, or lose a night sleep, when they go after protestors and arrest or erase them?

Laptops and the PC model

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

The earlier link leads to an interesting article on the PC industry. The WinTel mass market suppliers have carried the Desktop market model into the Laptop arena and are now reaping the downside. [This is what the US Car manufacturers did as well, developing too many me-to platforms and then forcing folks to option up singularly unattractive base models of which there were too many as well. ]

The solution is similar to the car industry as well: in the long run there needs to be an emphasis on base quality and fewer options. (Is it not strange that this is what Apple is doing?)

BUT why not take a step back as well. Components have gotten smaller and a Laptops frame can only get so small without losing functionality. All these companies have developed custom interfaces so they can plug in modules for this and that but also standardized the chassis frames so that they can ‘plug in the modules for this and that.’ In other words they should have a platform to move to the Home Build market and let people build their own. Companies could compete with plastic, aluminum, titanium or bamboo chassis with various levels of cooling sophistication in 17″, 15.6″, 15″, 14″ and tubby 13″. Keyboard manufacturers could offer various keyboard modules. You could buy motherboards with a variety of chip solutions . Graphics solutions. Phone net solutions. LCD Panel solutions. Battery solutions.

Now all of this would require the establishment of an interface standard. IBM did this for the Desktop market almost by accident, but there is no reason that companies like Dell, Asus, Acer, etc could not come together, they build only marginally differentiated systems now, the differentiation mostly based on a ‘keep those rascals out of my hardware’ business model and design history.

What would this do? 1) Make it cheaper to build ma, pa and baby laptops to be sold in the big box stores. 2) Create a market for high-end technology in moderately tight form factors for a range of suppliers 3) Allow those with the tennies to move into building mainline power user, mainline business and high-end units which I believe will owe more to the MacAir than the ThinkPad or Inspiron of yore.

Link

This is a really neat article on Intel’s Ultrabook initiative. In other words get other companies to compete against Apples MacAir 11″ and 13″ models. And he likes the ‘IBM’ keyboard and pointing stick to!