j1vms

> ...the faster it happens the more havoc it is likely to cause. If it happens over thousands of years then humans will adapt to a 'non constant' compass direction and find other ways to navigate.

Actually the more pressing matter regards animals that employ magnetoreception (birds, bacteria even!) where a change like this might be particularly devastating. This of course assumes that there is not already some undiscovered non-genetic mechanism to help with adjusting, say socially or physiologically. Human technology could adapt in at most a matter of decades, while genetic adaptation would takes orders of magnitude longer.

It was said that had the transistor not been discovered at Bell Labs, it would have developed somewhere else in the world within years. In fact, very similar work was taking place at Westinghouse in France under Mataré [0] and Heinrich Welker.

On the other hand, with Information Theory, Shannon was considered to have been ahead by decades.

The closest related work that is considered to come from an independent line of inquiry (taking place in the USSR), but similarly fundamental is Kolmogorov complexity (algorithmic entropy) by Andrey Kolmogorov [1] in 1963.

While Shannon made the huge leap on his own, it should be noted that Harry Nyquist [2] (his colleague at Bell Labs) laid essential foundations through his Nyquist Stability Criterion and studies on bandwidth. This came after harmonic analysis (Fourier transform, etc.) appeared in the 1800s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Matar%C3%A9

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist

It's probably the case that there are no scientists besides maybe Einstein (E = mc^2) and Newton (apple falling from the tree -> gravity) that the general public would be able to identify by name and refer to one thing that very roughly approximates what they did.

Who knows though, given the public's enthusiasm for modern tech and its stars (Jobs, Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc.) maybe one day scientists' work might make a "Casey's Top 40"-like popular countdown if presented the right way!

Till then there's always Epic Rap Battles of History, here's Einstein vs. Hawking (120 million views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k

Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" has so far been ended up being more of a problem for Moore's company than anyone else.

Between GPUs, more power efficient designs (due to heavy mainstream interest in mobile technology), more work put into algorithmic efficiency, and promising early developments in quantum computing, it appears the focus has shifted away from relying on more transistors per square inch for ensuring the industry's future growth.

Just thought I'd point out that a lot of the reason companies make it so hard to cancel subscriptions is that it literally is a more "brutal" change for them when it comes to accounting, and what they have to report back to investors.

Recurring income is more highly valued than one-off / extraordinary income. Most traditional companies (telecom, banks, even gyms) have been this way, backing off only when forced to by regulation. It's sad, but not surprising to see the newer breed of companies also adopt these practices.

Also, don't forget that Ellison was a former Apple board member, and probably not entirely unbiased on giving Google a rough time, and thus rallied behind Jobs when he vowed: "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." [0]

Of course, it was maybe just Ellison shrewdly leaping on a opportunity to profit off an undervalued ecosystem (Java) at the time. Going on almost a decade now, things certainly proved to be not so clear cut in Google favor, and might still pay off.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15400984

> ... at least for me it doesn’t make a huge difference compared to a 15-year sentence.

There isn't a huge difference between a death sentence versus 15 years in prison? You're kidding right?

Whether the person is in fact guilty or innocent, there is a significant difference between the two sentences, literally the difference between life or death. One irrevocably extinguishes the person's life - there is no going back. The other is a very long incarceration, cutting them off from society for that time, and offering at best a chance for correction.

Nice to see more solutions like these pop up.

Another great one is Magic Wormhole, which uses a parallel human-to-human channel to negotiate a secure machine-to-machine exchange:

https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole

> TLS is a great example of how to do it.

ASCII -> UTF8

VHS -> DVD

not as successful:

DVD -> BluRay : timing was rather close to the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.

Not a big fan of it either, though it's important to recognize that given the era it was released (early 1950s), it was quite ahead of its time. Perhaps ahead by at least 2 decades in anticipating American youth's punk culture, that we see from the mid-70s onward.

As a side note, you might give his later Franny and Zooey (1961) a try, finding a more nuanced Salinger at work.

> "Apple innovates like no other company on earth, and we are not taking our foot off the gas."

Apple has indeed accomplished many things since Jobs handed over the reins, but delivering a new, innovative compelling product line is not one of them. If they finally deliver on the Apple Car or some as yet unknown new product, they might finally fully move out of the shadow of Jobs' final tenure.

If not, they will find their existing product lines eaten away by relentless, industry commoditization. Having to bump profit margins on the iPhone X was their first serious stumble -- only to be rectified, if they can deliver a new, compelling product line in the next 1 to 2 years.

Also, as a practical aside, two mobiles devices could use their screens and front-facing cameras to negotiate a secure session for key-exchange, etc.

> from the top of my head, marketing gimmicks at some event, air gap jump and/or data exfiltration

data distribution over normally visual broadcast channel (TV -> mobile device, billboards -> mobile)

Great stuff! QR code is optimized for low error rates when the channel is a digital camera-based, single photo capture. If one uses a code designed for multiple capture over time (some video code), the transfer speed could be increased significantly. Thinking of it like a very noisy fibre optic channel, there's plenty of room for improvement.

> Italy alone used to be a dozen+ independent city states. Divided the world 200 ways seems like a lot unless you look at how much it's been divided historically. And in comparison, that's extremely centralized.

What's interesting is to consider that while the world is very centralized in the sense you described, "day-to-day" operations are even more decentralized than ever. That is, (very generally speaking) order is established and maintained, and people go about their lives without huge, burdensome micro-management from "above" in the important aspects of their daily life.

It probably turns out that the most consequential decision-making affecting the modern person's daily life is happening very locally in the social & spatial/temporal sense. So, in that way, authority is effectively decentralized.

> What is Apple/Google's next move?

Innovate. Cannibalize existing products. Surprise us. Unless they want to attract more of the "business" types that will suck them dry until they end up, one day, a long time from now... like Sears.

There are a lot of valid arguments to be made, but it's not clear that being an experiment is a sufficient one. One need only think of the "Great Experiment" [0], to realize that immaturity and instability might not be too much of a hindrance if purpose and mindshare can be ultimately established.

[0] https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/the-great-experiment

> Amazon is Jeff and Jeff is Amazon

True, and a scary thought for any heavy investors. That's why a company that size needs to have a publicly known succession plan given current valuation. There are people at Amazon who could take over but no one whom the market would trust with taking the reigns, right off the bat.

Another interesting one is Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France), fully contained within the eastern maritime borders of Canada. (edit: It is within Canadian exclusive economic zone which are international waters, not sovereign territory).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Saint-Pi...

Never too late for them to make a go for it, even today.

But, to avoid alienating their huge existing developer community, they would first do well to get behind Mono [0] and maybe even, make it official (edit: Mono is "Sponsored by Microsoft", so already quite official indeed). In fact, as of 2014, there have been very promising signs in that direction. [1]

[0] https://www.mono-project.com/

[1] https://opensource.com/business/14/11/microsoft-dot-net-empo...

True, though MSFT is at their all-time peak.

> I'm not sure Nvidia is in trouble. Investors who overestimated their future performance.

The problem is that management did not do enough (as far as investors were concerned) to temper market expectations. It may have been they truly did not know who was buying their product, and they believed most of their clients were coming from ML and gaming, when instead it was heavy, heavy crypto.

Other than that, as the article mentions, it was trade tensions that turned the quarter miss into a perfect storm for a sell-off.

Well, guess Intel's thinking "there's always Microsoft (Azure)."

I don't think it's settled which of Azure or AWS captures the most market share in the next decade. AWS has a lot going for it but MS is coming in hard and fast on the OSS to cloud integration front. Probably would have made sense for Amazon to pickup Red Hat from IBM.

> New Jersey is not New England.

In case anyone else is wondering, New England is (geographically) Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Every state north/east of New York state.

> why we even needed the Avogadro constant / mole as a fundamental constant(...?)

It serves as a link between human-scale and atomic-scale observations, classically needed for chemistry performed on Earth by humans. This link must exist, as others mentioned, for stoichiometric calculations (e.g. air/gas mixture in a internal combustion engine). For much of modern scientific history, it was deemed useful to scale into an easily eye-visible human scale (the gram). [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant#General_role...

Thought for a moment I read IBM Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, anyone else?

> ... be a large enough company that your internal operations make it too confusing to work out who to prosecute

But as illustrated in Breaking Bad season 5 (the Madrigal situation for those who have watched it), things don't necessarily work out going that way either.

In case anyone is interested, Carver Mead's 1990 seminal paper on the subject [0]. It's a fairly accessible read, and covers the power/computational efficiency trade-offs on the spectrum from natural, biological systems to manufactured analog vs. digital electronic systems.

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/documents/Mea...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead

Except that eventually a growing number of participants will start to barter where they can, and then someone will come up with the idea of a issuing some liquid token to facilitate things when bartering is not possible.

Lest we forget the warning that was Cloudbleed [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed