In the last year or so I’ve built a number of websites for clients and I’m always frustrated of going through thousands of bookmarks to find what I want, or googling and trying to find “that site” again.. so I’m going to try and get off my rear (well, probably spend more time on it) and make this a site that works for me. If it’s any use to anyone else then that makes me happy too.

The plan is to link to sites and describe things more than write large amounts of stuff myself, although who knows how it will pan out. I already have a contributor lined up who I’ve worked with and known for almost 20 years, so lets see how we get on.

James

The issue of course is that it’s not for everyone, it DOES require the purchase of an iPhone developer account at .. maybe £60 a year, and a certain minimal degree of technical knowledge, but surely, everything costs money, and it’s a small price to pay to get around the issues of distribution and allow an open community.

The free vs freedom issue is not always about money. I’m not an expert at software licensing by any standards, but to my understanding, GPL even allows you to sell products based on open code (there’s a market in selling wordpress/drupal/magento etc. themes for example).

So the proposal would be, the ‘customer’ gets an ADC membership from Apple, and then purchases a “developer licence” of the software that they want to install (an example would be licensing Unreal engine for your own uses), or a more simple way to put it would be selling just source code and associated resources to hack/build. With an iPhone ADC membership you can install applications that you build onto a physical device.

Perhaps this opens the door for a marketplace of source code that is either completely open, or sold in some way. There may not be any way to protect your code as it could no doubt end up downloadable from elsewhere, and any kind of DRM would be in the source to remove as the user sees fit, but as such that is not the purpose of this suggestion. The complaint seems to be that community build projects are not possible without jailbreaking, or that selling apps past the app store is not possible.. if you have a project and the right version of xcode, it’s pretty much as simple as opening it and hitting run to get it on the simulator, or a not much more involved build process to get it on the actual device.

I’m not sure how the ADC Terms and Conditions go, perhaps by distributing an app outside of the iTunes App store in any form is prohibited, and since I don’t make software as such this is not really something that bothers me personally, but it seems to be a major argument developers have about the problems of a closed platform..

With an associated cost of £60 a year for ADC membership, open source kids might find it upsetting that you have to pay for the privilege of installing an app that you either have to pay for separately, or even for the tools to do so, but paying for tools is fairly normal outside the minority that are purely running free. Even using Linux and all the free software you’re still paying for the hardware, and I’d imagine a good chunk of the cost is related to patent licensing of manufacture and such (the cost of an Intel chip is surely not pure manufacturing and distribution, and anyone that thinks so is not thinking hard enough). Could it be a reasonable alternative to whining about your app being completely at the mercy of the app store approval team?

Just a thought…

Over the last few years I have let my website slip, mainly due to my change in priorities, and change in what it is that I do. It started out as a tool to gain some recognition and create some contacts as I’m sure many websites did and still do, but I realised that it wasn’t really as simple as that. Even with traffic and people interested in what we were up to (it was a design collective), that did not really translate into what I wanted to do or be. I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing people over the years, and I’m sure I’ll work with many more in the years to come, but what should my legacy be and how should I spend my time to feel that I have been justified in existence..

There has never been a push to make this blog more than just a personal experiment and it was never really maintained in the way that it needs to be in order to create any useful content. I unpublished all of the posts because of a single comment, possibly the only comment to ever hit the site that wasn’t spam. I was purely voicing my opinion on some things that I’ve thought about and played with, nothing with too much real deep research into the subject, and the comment went something like “maybe you should learn about physics properly if you’re interested in it”.

To me, this was against the purpose of what I was writing. I do try to learn as much as I can but can’t for semi obvious reasons, dedicate all of my time to all subjects of interest. At the same time I like to think about these things and have a need to share these thoughts whether they are right or wrong. The maths or the reality that I was considering in my head was really more for my benefit than any reader, and more of a catalogue of thoughts than a true resource for real world ideas. Thinking back, the reason I removed the posts was that I was embarrassed to a degree that I didn’t know the right answer or even if it did exist, but had come to my own conclusions about it. I now think that maybe these things should be put online again. It was disheartening to think that my ideas were not welcome in a pool of knowledge because they were not as well formed as someone with a degree in the subject, or possibly someone with any kind of training in the field, but perhaps that doesn’t really mean that my contribution to the world of content is useless. Surely there is more inane things to read than any ramblings of ideas and concepts that for one reason or another make it into my head.

I’m not claiming to have any answers, I am just collecting my thoughts, so feel free to think I’m stupid or crazy, I do however hope that you might do the same.. ideas are the true resource of our time and our species. There is little harm in having an idea that is wrong as it may be useful to somebody in some way.. ideas should be collected and shared so that inspiration can be found and used to create something wonderful. It can come from seeing a picture of the earth from space, or to a further extreme, staring endlessly at the Hubble deep field images, all the way down to seeing a speck of dust sitting on the front of my screen whilst playing with my camera and seeing the vast difference putting a polariser makes.. or sharing some words like in the book I’m currently reading, Antimatter.. there are things that make up this world that have substance and things that are pure energy but don’t have a physical presence.. that blew my mind.. a particle that comes together to make an atom that goes together with others to make tangible things such as the keys I’m typing on right now, but there is “something” that is also a particle that has no mass, just energy, something that exists without existing. This is a language and philosophy issue, and in itself asks, “what is it to exist?” or “what is the nature of existence and reality?” .. or any other similarly phrased questions

I will quote it properly in another post because this made a fairly hefty impression on me, but the reason for this post is not to put these things in, it is to give myself a mantra that things I find that inspire me should be shared to inspire anyone who finds them inspiring. If someone gets the feeling that I get when I read something that makes me stop and stare off into nothing for a bit, then it was more than worth it.

So, I suppose this is a “lets do it over” post.. it is entirely possible that I will write things about subjects I have no knowledge of, simple and often wrong opinions, but this is me, and the reason for writing it is as I’ve said, to collect my thoughts and not to educate people on how things really are. If at any point in doing this I am right, or come up with something useful to even just one person, then the other completely wrong thoughts are cancelled out in my mind. It is up to you, the reader to decide what to do with the words that I write on here. So, right or wrong, this is a subsection of the inside of my head.

It’s a call to arms to myself to not censor my thoughts and ideas, and to create a legacy of content that I can remind myself of times past for the celebration or cringing of my future self.

Thanks

James

So what is the REAL cost of employees sitting on computers all day and sometimes being distracted into the world of friends and what they are doing instead of working?

An unrelated question also arises, how can non tech companies take real advantage of the internet beyond marketing and selling..

Music for example is a business that is digitizable as we have seen. Content delivery has become a whole other aspect of the entertainment industries, something which suits the information age. How though can other industries do the same. For example, transport is necessarily a physical problem, moving people and items from one location to another. How can companies like Ford, BMW, Mercedes etc. digitize themselves to become as ubiquitous as Google for the longer term?

We face some problems in the future with energy, if for example petrol/gasoline runs low or out, how can transport companies keep a grip, and more to the point, would it really matter. The motor industry worldwide is a large proportion of all revenues and it is seeing a drop in sales to the point that even the seemingly most stable companies are either going under or being baled out by governments. This is not a sound business model going forward. If in the next 10-20 years the resources to power cars and planes has dwindled to the point that the average consumer can’t afford it we will see all kinds of ill affects.

So companies that provide communications could be set to replace real travel? Virtual reality replaces physical meetings? I don’t believe it’s that simple.

Two major issues present themselves. The power consumption of computing will continue to rise and itself be an issue to power. Secondly, goods must be transported, whether from farms to supermarkets, or as we shop and do more online, goods being transported between buyers and sellers.

Although alternative fuels are probably not so complicated for ground travel, air travel is a different story. Getting a compact and powerful enough fuel to power trans atlantic flight is only one of the concerns.

The reality is that if we don’t find alternative energy sources and perfect them in time, then society in it’s entirety will collapse. The current economic recession is not directly related to this but perhaps a not too distant future recession will be. Companies that are not profitable must be removed to free up resources for current and future business models that actually work.

None of this is simple, and as usual I’m not an economist or in any way qualified to make real statements on the subject, this is purely conversational. We now have the technology to gather and analyze statistics and make a difference, perhaps even on a global scale. Of course this requires political support as changes to society cannot be imposed but have to be agreed upon. If we were allowed to play god or perhaps just “global leader” how would money and resources best be distributed?

Global trade is great for causing very noisy statistics but it seems to lead to a very unstable global economy as we are seeing now. As a very isolated example, since the economy is bad, car exports in Japan are down by a HUGE amount. Not directly the fault of – but the devaluation of currencies such as the British Pound and US Dollar vs Japanese Yen has had a hand in the nosedive of Japanese exports. We simply cannot afford to buy in as we could before, and it seems that we’re not really buying as before in terms of cars and technology products at least. We are complaining of things we cannot afford when many countries may compare us in a similar way, we just don’t like the roles reversed.

My data set is purely here-say, but to me this seems like a reasonable round assessment of the situation. The point is that the data itself is not important, it’s the concept of trade resting on top of currency markets. GDP is an interesting but flawed way to measure economies. It’s worth taking a look at wikipedias GDP entry. I would be interested to see what might happen if currency were unified across the world. I am not advocating that, and I haven’t really researched into the Euro’s affect on Europe’s economic situation, but simply, if we all used a universal currency, what would that do to import and export? Would it empower the countries who’s currency is generally considered weak enough to exploit? Or would it cause collapses to the supposedly ‘more powerful’ economies like the USA etc. or both.

I could imagine that leveling the playing field would not be very popular, I will generalize that – the rich would most likely want to hold on to control of their assets, and the super poor would possibly most like to have a standard of living suitable for a human being, and people in between would probably like to have a little more.

I have to apologize that this entry (as probably many others) are not simple structured, “identify problem and discuss” kinds of posts. What I want to say is a mixture of
a) beyond my true knowledge to talk in detail about, and
b) important enough that I want to say something about

Any and all opinions are flawed because although they are trying to be ‘bigger picture’ concepts, there are large parts of society and economies that are missing and so it’s not even an argument, merely a set of semi related questions to myself. Something that perhaps I will take a bit more in depth at some point.

Thanks for listening

It assumes that people would pay to send this report around their company rather than photocopy it and pass it around, or perhaps scan and email it to the relevant people, or many other cheaper, free, or less hassle options (such as picking 10 copies up from a news agents). This box, however, raises the copyright issue by offering the alternative. Without that alternative, who would hesitate to do any of the above to get the information around? If I didn’t offer you a copy of a cut down version of this magazine, would you even consider going to buy a copy for all of your staff and putting it on their desks, hoping that they will actually read it? Would you consider that doing so would actually be illegal?

As an aside, there is a very interesting bit of insight into this in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I think I have mentioned in a previous post about this book, but he talks about an old subscription offer in The Economist where you could buy an online subscription at one price, the magazine subscription at another price, and a special deal for both at the same as the higher price. By putting the decoy offer in, you’re tempted by the higher price offer of both print and web editions, and I’d imagine they made more money as we fell for their marketing. Back to the post:

Of course they have a right to charge for the content, this is now my issue here, but in today’s society, I feel that we wouldn’t even think of sending them some extra cash just because we showed the article to a couple of friends.. that’s like sending money to a film studio every time you watch a DVD with people in the room, other than the person who paid for the DVD.. I want to comment in another post about how it seems like the internet has killed the worlds economies as regular businesses struggle to keep up, and as many people have mentioned we’re about due for a world reset, but that will come later.

The real irony was that the box itself was at the end of an article which was about Brewster Kahle’s internet archive & free library.. after covering a story on how he’s fighting to free up non copyrighted material, the Rights and Syndication department of The Economist is telling you to contact them if you want to pass these articles around. TELLING.. this is very interesting since the open library would surely be great if it had newspapers and magazines in it, but is there more copyright issues on this article than on many books?

On the internet, it is possible to find information about pretty much anything, much of it for free.. also slightly complicating things is that on the Economist’s own website, some of these articles are available to read, which would fall under the Internet Archive, available online (you can also purchase the PDF of the special report, which I’m sure you could email around fairly easily after buying one copy, no?).

I find the Economist a strange read, this isn’t the first time I’ve been completely confused by it.. for example, in a recent article on the environment in Eastern Europe they talk about a Russian millionaire who owns an Aluminum plant which has turned a few local lakes toxic.. how is this legal firstly? ..and secondly. . their extremely non bias opinion in this case is disturbing. It gives the message that it’s ok to do what you want to the planet as long as it’s profitable. I imagine perhaps New Scientist covering the same story looking at “Environmental devastation”.

I think it’s time to unsubscribe.

What I found very interesting though, was that I could see little dark patches and spots on the floor where perhaps a little bit of food that needs to be cleaned was laying, or even a cockroach was walking.. but a very surreal aspect of this was, anything under a certain size was completely invisible if I stared at it, but if I allowed my eyes to wander I could see it in the periphery. Assuming that usually you can see in front of you and vision is less sensitive to the edges, this was very odd indeed.

So perhaps you’re thinking that I’m just seeing things and that actually the dots are my imagination since there’s not even enough light.. so after staring for 15-20 minutes mesmerized by the curious things I was seeing, I took my small camera and took a bunch of photos with a flash in the dark. Without moving the camera (similar to looking into a star field) I had a couple of sequential images to compare and sure enough, the dark spots were bugs, and the bits that weren’t moving were either bits of food or cockroaches dead from previous accidents. It all sounds pretty horrific, but in total I think there’s maybe 8 walking around and laying there.. it’s not as if the floor is crawling, and hopefully the poison gets to work very quickly.

So what’s going on here? A first thought would be that when your iris is open to allow the maximum amount of light in, as with close-up photography, specifically using a macro lens on a small object, the depth of field decreases, but this shouldn’t really play a part in it since I can still see the dark lines of the tiles.

One difference between an eye and a camera is that while the film plane is flat in a camera, your retina is the inside of a sphere, which not being an optician or expert here but perhaps might affect our depth of field slightly? I would imagine that mostly what that would do would be to have a far narrower focus, since anything not directly centered would not be hitting the fovea, and inside the curve would become closer to the lens and so blurred if the lens was acting to focus the image to the center. I imagine we would be overwhelmed if everything was constantly in focus, and so it makes perfect sense that we would benefit from a small very clear area, and a large blurry area that is primarily to detect movement in the periphery.

The subject matter was 1-1.5M away doesn’t make me think I would be getting any drastic depth of field. Now I can’t imagine that the blind spot is directly centered, and I’m hoping that this is normal and not something I should get checked out.

A couple of thought sprung to mind, and were equally swiftly dismissed. Perhaps the eye is actually accustomed to more light at the center since that’s where we lay focus during the day on a cellular level, and so it is calibrated differently from the periphery? Well I suppose that might make sense, but how then would it end up less sensitive in the dark?

I also wondered that maybe the lens would be a different shape, argument for either flatter or fatter still didn’t conclude, but since in the low light there is no easy way to find focus on an object, perhaps the lens is relaxed (and so fatter?) which means it bends light differently. Could that explain why more light from off center was actually being focussed on the area of the retina surrounding the usual focus point? And that if i stared directly at a dark spot I would actually find myself staring into nothing, until perhaps the ‘dark spot’ walked back into view/out of my direct focus?

Another thought that just occurred would be that since the non focussed area would produce a blurred image, and the lens would also be producing a blurred image off center, perhaps the blur from the lens was the result of collecting more light from a larger area but not putting it into a point, so the sharpness is reduced, but the amount of collected light would actually be increased. I am thinking along the lines of the “two blurred images” (I’m referring of course to one blurred image but the two points in the eye which are out of focus, i.e. the lens and the retina) combining in a way that actually gives more information about the light intensity than the imperfect focus of the direct center of the eye. The only way I can think to describe this visually would be similar to lens flare, multiple images from internal reflections cueing up and shifting in a way that might be describable as parallax.

Anyway, that’s just a brief write up and I think I’d be wise to look further into it before making any bold statements, but I’m quite interested to see if this is documented and what the answer is.. hopefully not that there’s something wrong with my eyes!

As is my usual disclaimer, this is merely a question or opinion, not anything following significant research, but perhaps a topic that I might grant some research in the future.

Beauty is subjective, people agree or they don’t on the beauty of an object or a person. In art it is the same.. a painting or drawing will always be a painting or a drawing, but will it ever really be possible to label it as art, and who is to decide?

I personally have some issues with creativity, some are probably semantic, in that I would rather consider myself a problem solver with an eye for layout and aesthetics, than an ‘artist’. I feel that art often has the opportunity to be very lazy in creating a product, whether painting or installation. What I find questionable about ‘art’ is that for example, on a film with an art department, the team work as a hive to produce a coherent work, which in general far outstrips what one person could achieve. However, an unmade bed, a pile of bricks, a badly made film, however conceptual, will never to my mind compare to the collective talent put together in a truly good film without limiting budget constraints that’s developed over time specifically to get emotional response, tell a story, and possibly even change the world at some level. Yet we question paying £10 to own it on DVD but if we can afford it, and it is our interest, we may have no reserves about paying thousands for a single painting.

Aesthetics aside, people can be considered great artists because of a way that they choose to portray a concept. The concept may or may not be particularly revolutionary, and the reason to do the art is not always true inspiration but often pressure and need.

That I mentioned the unmade bed and pile of bricks does point to the importance of these ‘artists’ in our society. Like the lost generation of TV watchers, we need ties that remind us what happened at a point in time, that is part of what defines our existence.

This is not to say that nothing is art, more that what is often considered art these days, is quite far from it to my mind.

Like many jobs, for example, a writer may fight against a block to put across what they want to put across, and when they do, perhaps it’s not in the way that they see it in their mind, they see their product as unsuccessful and wish to refine it until it either carries their signature, or has no further progression in sight, based on constraints for time and money, or lack of will to continue to perfection.

Perfection is where the argument of this post is aimed. What is perfect, is perfect what some would consider divine?
Perfect can be mathematical in nature, at least in some ways, for example, a friend made a perfect sphere from a stone. This in itself took a couple of weeks of labour to turn out a small perfectly smooth object about 2cm high. I could argue that to create an object to the tolerances that would allow everyone to see it as a sphere is quite an achievement, perhaps deserving the respect of a great craftsperson. The object carries a history of thought, to hold it and know how it was made, you can carry the story and visualize it at all stages of production. We can also manufacture in huge quantities metal ball bearings to very high tolerances, but have no excitement when we hold one in our hands. By hand seems to carry huge value in comparison.

I’m not putting forward a particularly coherent argument because I don’t have very strong beliefs either way, I just take issues with the way that the terms “art”, “artist”, and “creative” get thrown around like they are meaningless, and as such, have become meaningless.

From my point of view, religion is a construct, and the notion of divinity in a religious sense is wrong to me. But without religion, what is the frame of reference? Are morals inherent or are they brought about by religion? Without morals, would we have a concept of good and bad, in action and in content, or is action and content so far removed that we cannot compare them in the same sense.. do we know good or bad without god?

Now I think it’s fair to argue that because we don’t all subscribe to a religion these days, we’re not going to run around and just kill people and steal because we don’t know any better. It is further in our nature to be social animals, and in a society we understand the repercussions of such actions and as such do them at our own risk. We can almost look at religion as an excuse to do things against society rather than for it.. but did these inherent morals in society form because of historic religions?

I know that I am asking more questions than I set out to answer, and I suppose that was to be expected. My dilemma is that I perhaps see ‘art’ as pointless without a god, and the fact that I don’t believe in a god, logically leads me to thinking that the creation of art is pointless. Art should be a reflection of a soul, which without god there is none, and so I can still believe that the artists in history who have believed in god, can create such masterworks, because their goal is impressing the divine, not the wallet.

Religion is a broad tool to give people the need to exist, and to co-exist. Without this tool, the question of ‘why am I here’ takes on a new meaning. The difference being, god would have me here for a specific purpose, but since in my mind there is no god, then I have no meaning.. yet I still exist. I don’t find this at all depressing, if anything I find it empowering that the only person that controls what I should do with my life is me. I choose to do what I choose to do because I know how that will affect me in society, and that is working towards how I wish to be.

Perhaps that selfishness is part of the trouble in the world today, should I wish to, I can focus my life on self improvement, whilst religions teach to look out for others and generally make the world a better place with compassion. Perhaps I’m not an artist, but I can still be a compassionate Atheist.

After switching a few years back from Windows machines I’m pretty much locked into the Apple brand now, with expensive software that would need replacing should I jump ship. That’s not really a problem, I’m happy overall with the machines I’ve had over the last few years, but face a really tough dilemma when looking at replacements.

So I’m looking for a laptop, Apple has quite a wide range.. what is my budget.. well, I suppose it’s flexible, if I’m going to use this as a main machine for 2-3 years, hopefully more since I’ll still have a big desktop, then the cost becomes reasonably irrelevant.

So how do I decide? After ‘reading’ the audiobook “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely, which I found very interesting (I suppose I should thank the guys on the TWiT podcast for the recommendation) something dawned on me. In a very interesting section about directing customers to a particular product, it seemed to me that Apple has cleverly done that throughout the range. Clever pricing leaves you so lost that you’re willing to climb the ladder right to the top, or so it seems.

In the book, the example is ..

a company making bread machines launches a product and starts to sell it at an electronics store. Sales are bad.. so they hire a marketing expert to sort it out. They are advised to create a premium version of the product at a higher price point to put alongside the original, which they do. Sales increase..

This is an example of giving the customer a frame of reference with which to make a purchasing decision. The customer correctly bought the cheaper one, and it became a successful product, one that people had lived quite happily without.

On to the Apple laptop lineup. The prices in GBP are as follows:

Ok.. so what does that say to us (apart from the fact that I’m obviously obsessed enough to write an Apple price comparison blog post). What I find really interesting is that at every step there’s a small price jump of around £100, and a very appealing reason to go to the next one. Ignoring the very top and very bottom, the White macbook at £719 is aimed at students and entry level, and the top top one seems aimed at the professional with no limit to budget. The extra £210 in price doesn’t really affect the performance significantly unless you’re running something processor heavy, in which case maybe it would be justified.

So, which do you buy? Budgets are flexible, as I mentioned, this is quite an investment considering a normal PC laptop will probably set you back £500 upwards, but there’s cheaper if you want, and obviously more expensive.. I think that all options are viable and as such none jumps out as “the one for me”. The fact that I’d consider climbing all the way to the 17″ at £1,949, when I could also fairly happily go for the lowest in the group at £929 I find amazing. How could I be so drawn to something double the price with really not significantly more functionality? Sure it might be faster, with a bigger screen with brighter colours, but for £1,000 I could do alot.. a holiday perhaps?

It would be very interesting to see who bought what, am I the only person who feels completely lost with a terrible .. “want all want none” kind of attitude. Has the marketing backfired into confusion for the consumer, or are people happily going into the shop, seeing the size they like and ignoring the price and the specifications. It’s a tradition among geeks to know and care about all of the details to the point that you’ll never make a decision. Also in the book cited above is a story of a friend of the authors who was looking for a digital camera. He spent months deciding on the minor specifications between two that he was interested in, looking online for prices and reviews, and when he eventually got one he realized he’d missed the chance to use it for one of his children’s birthdays, a family holiday etc.. all for the details.

The same goes for most technology, which has become something of a fetish object, something to obsess over. We are not immune to marketing and clever pricing, but in some cases we should place less emphasis on the actual item we buy and more on the ability of the item to do the job which we require of it.

As a UC berkeley Grad Student Bill worked for Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Computer has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology.

So what does it mean? Well I’m sure there’s plenty of information out there by people far more qualified to talk about it than me, so I won’t go into the details that I believe, but on watching a couple of seminars from the Computer History Museum (search the term on youtube), I see a lot of things that we have today that we pretty much had working in the 60’s.. things that we praise ourselves for and consider new and innovative today. Most of these things are not new ideas, but refinements and technological advances. Things that have become reality to the public.

So what if any, is the significance of, say – the mobile phone, the iPod, or the personal computer? No doubt these and many many other things which we have come to take for granted are significant, but are they really enabling technologies? They have a huge social, commercial and environmental impact, changing the way we think about and view information, money and entertainment. We have been becoming a more connected society for quite some time, where even regular members of the public (as oppose to military, science and education), the majority in fact, are connected in some way. But are the consumers going to see the singularity or will we have to witness it post singular.. in the same way that only the super rich will become space tourists in the near term, only the super rich will be able to afford to become singular part robot super-beings.. the iCulture will be left behind.

I suppose this was in part prompted by an article about a ‘portable web server, right on your iPhone’, which had comments of wow’s and general elation, as if this was the killer app that would change the world. But what would it change? Isn’t it just a sign that we really don’t understand technology en mass? Servers in certain forms are running the back end of all kinds of services. OS X is a BSD operating system, and as such uses the client/server model for many services in ways that I’m not qualified to comment on. If the iPhone is a cut down OS X, then a server on a phone is really nothing more than getting excited that the thing runs software.. it’s implicit in it’s nature! The OS is using a client/server model in many ways so it’s really nothing new. Yet still the public get excited. We are sheep and understand nothing. Ok, so it’s a WEB server.. what is it’s purpose? No signal or no battery = no website?

I can see I leave myself wide open to criticism on this, an unresearched and cited comment making sweeping statements about the vast human population, insinuating that we’re a bunch of idiots. A great quote springs to mind

a person is intelligent but people are stupid

It’s pretty much why marketing works in my opinion. Hyperbole.

In relation to that, I was interested to read a review of a new Canon camera, the eos 50D. If my memory serves me well (it’s quite a long review), the sensor from the 40D to it’s replacement 50D went from 10 Megapixels to 15 Megapixels. Quite a jump you would think, or is it? Ignoring the other improvements in the camera itself, they are very specifically comparing the two and the image quality. Now it turns out that because the sensor is so dense, the light becomes more noisy.. read the review, it’s quite interesting. The point is, the sensor with more MP’s is actually no improvement on the older sensor. Of course Canon won’t tell you this, and possibly the reviewers are wrong, but if they are right, it shows that we are in a marketing trap. More = better.. right?

Similar to computer specs that we drool over and compare endlessly, what is the enabler here? At what point do we have enough power to do what we want to do, and the rest becomes wasted? It’s a complicated marketing issue again.

We are open to new threats because of this reliance and acceptance of ‘new technology’. Take viruses or say, a Denial of Service attack. Companies can disappear off the web. If the infrastructure goes down, chaos ensues and if their core income is web based.. then the company can die. Technology has rendered us fragile. The economy is fragile anyway so perhaps living on the edge isn’t anything new, but it’s a double edged sword these days.

Socially we feel empowered by it all, but it’s really just the size and price that has shrunk, and the ubiquity of the technology because it’s become affordable that makes us feel the difference. Are these really new inventions, or just old inventions tarted up and put out to the mass market? Not that there’s anything wrong with that..

I recently saw an old demo of a ‘webcam’ kind of system from 1962, black and white, but real time. Now if 45 years on we are living in the future with our machines that have built in webcams, I feel somewhat disappointed that that’s all we can do and feel proud of ourselves. Of course the infrastructure to make this work mobile and to make the machines portable is progress, but our machines that are orders of magnitude more powerful still have unreliable slow interfaces (at least the few I own do). What have we really used all that power on? Or is it just that my 4 year old dual G5 machine with 4.5GB RAM can’t handle a few tabs in a web browser and a few programs open in the background? What am I doing wrong? It was touted as able to handle all kinds of complicated things when I bought it.. how is it not able to now? I suppose as the processor has been phased out, the software isn’t optimized to the same degree..

This makes me want to switch to a low powered machine running a light flavor of Linux, one where if I can work out how, I can make sure that the UI is the priority, and the programs are secondary, since the UI is my user experience. Perhaps just updating to a newer machine would solve it, but how the last 4 years is enough to kill my machine when in 40 years we’ve not progressed enough!? OK, I’m laboring the point.

The real point that this post was meant to make was that the exponential growth in technology is a slippery concept, underlying the slippery singularity. In terms of transistors per $, or operations per second, we’re exponentially progressing as the charts seem to show, but what are we doing with this new found power? Flashier graphics, higher resolution for images and videos.. basically stuff we could do already, just better.

I say ‘we’ as in ‘the consumers’, I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise. In military and HPC science markets perhaps the progress is more tangible but less understandable to the public. Maybe I should make more effort to go to 2600 every month, join an AI hacking group, or a robotics group.. or find some people to work with that are positive about progress whether it’s towards a singularity or not.