jjindev

In a multi-computer household you may want a computer (or many!) which specifically do not have your important information. (I don't even let my phone know my "real" email address.)

I am pro running, but anti-marathon. One resembles normal daily activity, the other a major survival event.

All currencies rely on belief (like those flats in Monty Python). It is possible that gold could lose global belief, but unlikely, given the long history of belief. The US dollar too could lose faith, but again, a pretty good history of trust. Bitcoin? I think belief and trust battle novelty a bit. Will enough people believe, in 20 years, to power the computations necessary at that point? Or will a more novel and exciting currency emerge?

I suspect this will be a long-tail answer, but what the heck:

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

It is not a perfect book, but it did get me running, and in that sense literally changed my life.

Isn't it possible that the Pros are a ... dividend ... for faithful Apple fans? I mean, does the Pro line even have to be a money maker? (I agree with others that the people who need this kind of machine are rare these days, but why not support them?)

Couldn't it be that early Teds harvested low hanging fruit? By that I mean a backlog of 20 years worth of under exposed idea people? Once you've done Frans de Waal (etc.) you can't just go find another.

To restate, C++ programmers are doing C++ because they are trapped in a corner world where they must suffer for speed. Go's architects think they've got a band of problems where ... you just don't have to suffer so much. "no, me, I still need to suffer?"

The narrow definition of disruptive technology is probably something like "a new entrant who through a low cost product, depowers much more established and high end players." That's a bit different than just trying to be top dog.

Christensen did good descriptive work in his early books. Disruption was a thing. He tagged it, studied it, and described it. All that was very helpful. I actually am sympathetic to his later prescriptive works, I think they are seeking to solve social problems through disruptive change. I think what's happening in this essay though is that Pasquale sees the effect bound to the prescriptions, or even some alliance of pundits. That's just not the case. We can argue suggestions, but disruption will keep happening where we don't expect it ... because it is a thing.

On most days start-up programmers think about carving out a solution for a large enough serviceable, available, market. Time to market matters. Mark it as an open issue and move on. Etc. On other days, programmers are advised that it is culturally insensitive to leave anyone behind. People are mock-scolded that if they don't allocate their efforts to the 0.01% subset of their name system, they are bad people, whatever start-up dream they had.

BTW, my family used the Scandinavian "-sen" system of naming, until the government told everyone they had to stop, that heritable names made tracking easier. I'm one of the thousands/millions of people worldwide locked in as "son of Jens."

I drove up the I-15 a couple weeks ago, and was surprised that when I hit northern Utah I saw a couple tech-recruitment billboards. We don't have those down in Orange Country.

wasn't /usr the original /home? as I understand it, it grew and became a system directory. with /bin as the original bin.

I feel like I did my best work when I got up from the keyboard and walked around the office, maybe got some cookies, and thought of the big simplifying idea. And sure, I have no problem banging good ideas into a commodity PC running Linux. That is my preference, actually. They are simple and easily replaceable.

Addendum - adding it up, I think I spent about 15 or 20 thousand USD on various Macs from 1984 to 2000. Part of my experience might be "premium fatigue."

If we stick to "economics" without even going to "well-being," I think median net worth is the best bet. But you know, governments find it easier to "book" corporate profits as part of GDP and call it a day.

It was shocking for me when I first encountered people who make $200K+ and didn't know where all the money went. I too presumed that being "savvy" was somehow linked with high income. I now know it is not that tight a binding.

Going back to iOS devices, they provide a simple filter. People who buy them pay more, and they are therefore likely to pay more again. It really says nothing about their income or credit card balance. It is purely about spending habits.

It is a dilemma for the sort of developer who would not drop thousands in an app store (or even hundreds). Android becomes best for personal use, while iOS becomes best for finding spendy customers.

(I certainly feel this. Ubuntu/Android suits me, but if I'd held my nose and bought an apple toolchain (mac->phone) 5 years ago I probably would be better off today.)

So um, Euler owns "Largest prime factor" now?

Seriously the web is big, github is big, Euler is pretty big. Overlap is unavoidable. The [thing,] I'd think would be to ask for no direct linkages. "Go ahead, share your prime factor code, but for goodness sake [do] not document it as a 'Euler Problem.'"

While the author attempts to view the world as a user, I think many of his bad experiences are early adopter woes. Given that most people didn't have smart phones in those early days, I'm not sure ancient history matters.

In the long term it will be a battle between mature and slowly changing phone/tablet OSes. Apple knows this, which is why they are desperately designing watches.

Everyone mentions Nike, but no one says Garmin. Perhaps it's just my background, but I see the influx of phone and phone-connected solutions as eating Garmin's lunch. Their solutions (including wearables) still probably have the edge in precision and battery life ... but Fitbit and the upward growth of pedometers is disruption for them.

It would be interesting to live in a world where you couldn't show off your logo at ... I was about to say "Starbucks" but I should say ... the coffee shop.

This isn't to indict any particular brand, but when a brand is strong enough consumers of that brand use it to self-brand themselves. They wear the halo effect. And as I read Paul's essay I get some undercurrent that he's "hey, it's ok" to self-brand differently.

Could the coupon box "train" customers to jump on deals when offered? Perhaps that is the seller's hope, and that it is about a relationship and revenue stream into the future.

(I'm not saying this "training" is a net win for the seller, but I can see "loyalty" as one of their goals.)

Jared Bernstein answers Barry Ritholz on related themes today:

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/economics-as-market-failure/

It's really hard to tell, especially outside the field, whether someone's computation has found signal and not noise in their data series, or even whether that data series has any significance for different times and different places ...

(You can "Monte Carlo" the past as much as you want, it won't become the future.)

Edit: I probably should have just referenced Sliver's Signal and Noise and left it at that.

Apple illustrates a segmentation rather than a convergence. Tablet, notebook, and workstation are breaking into distinct bands of performance. In their world a tablet is for a guy who wants a couple cores (with long battery life), notebooks are for people want a few cores (with moderate battery life) and workstations are for people want lots of cores (the electric bill be damned).

In the PC market there is more overlap, with pretty solid $700 minitowers, but again the minitowers imply you will pay for the electricity and performance with a cost in size and portability.

Long term ... sure maybe a 12 core tablet is possible, but that is really long term IMO.

The way I've interpreted Ubiquitous Computing is that you walk into a room, and there is a computer. You pick it up and use it as casually as you would a magazine or a pad of paper.

You've done a valid experiment, but I think it illustrates why "if I only had one" is a wrong interpretation of Ubiquity. You don't just have one. If you are like most tech people you have a few, and maybe a lot, of functioning and current hardware. You probably have desktops and notebooks you can use.

And so in that environment a tablet should be good for the things you want to do when you just grab a tablet, in a room or an environment which isn't intended for serious work. And part of grabbing a tablet should be good integration with the other elements of your ubiquitous computing network.

"rather than replacing one dynamic library"

Library and version management at Integration (and before test) simplifies the question "what version are you on?" There is one answer, which for many environments may be useful.

Microprocessors evolved while chasing minicomputer features, which in term were shaped by C/UNIX sorts of ideas, which expanded and fed back. That was a very successful co-evolution. COTS supercomputers beat specialized hardware and specialized forms of parallelism not because they were abstractly better, but because markets and economies of scale drive whatever is popular to be the best performing and cheapest over time. (Down to $30 UNIX systems on a board.)

The two language schools you describe seem to be asking whether it is time (whether we have enough capacity) to simply float a new more mathematical world view on top of it all, or whether we should continue to play toward the strengths of the commodity hardware stack.

I personally think that something like Go works for my mind, and the hardware. (I will go make coffee now, rather than "define coffee" and wait for it to appear ;-)

I was speaking from a US perspective. I think we lag. We probably could import that tech of course ... and I was really grasping for under subscribed fields. Any other suggestions?

Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen have had a lot of interesting discussions on the role and extent of "signalling" in higher education. I think Hanson takes the extreme view that it is mostly signalling, rather than skills (human capital).

Obviously we see that at some level. "He's a college man" doesn't have the cache it did in 1920.

Yes, and, it's an "attention economy."

I call a field "fully subscribed" when it has enough money and researchers to make full progress. It's over subscribed when you are far into diminishing returns. And of course, under subscribed fields lack everything.

What is under subscribed today? Electric cars less than they were, but perhaps zero energy homes ...

I don't see a link to Rob Pike's other contribution, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant"

http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

It's really a very good piece, which I'd summarize as a catch-22. To be important you must be different. To be successful you must be the same. Linux solves that by being the same. (And indeed Apple, acquiring NeXT did as well.)