iPhone Article

How The iPhone Blew up The Cell Industry is a good article in Wired about the iPhone development and business change. Since I have one in my pocket, it may be more interesting to me. I remember a time when in order to buy the latest and greatest PC it was $5K or better of more expensive dollars.

No longer. Where the iPhone is built makes very little difference, the design, deals and profit end up with Apple and AT&T. Japan thought that manufacturing excellence was the way to a perpetually growing economyin the '70s and '80s. Their stock market peaked at 39K in the late 80's and it hovers around 15K now. If we would have listened to guys like Lee Iaccoca and most Democrats in the '80s, we could be sitting at 50% of our 89 market highs as well.

The need for continual innovation to provide growth ought to be plain. This article shows a concrete example. The "growth economy" of tomorrow is not going to be the same as the growth economy of today, and the way to predict that economy isn't by listening to government bureaucrats, MSM reporters, or even ivory tower professors. "The way" is the way of creative destruction, and it involves a lot of experiment, failure, and plain old luck. There better be millions of people taking part in that, not any supposedly super brilliant central planners. If they WERE super brilliant, they would realize they weren't as smart as millions of people.

Voting Irregularities in New Hampshire

This link on supposed Diebold voting irregularities. in New Hampshire showed up on a techie net clipping service this AM. I was noticing that the MSM seemed quite incurious about potential irregularities in NH, even though the "polls were very wrong" problem was much larger than the often reported case in '04 where the polls said that Kerry would win. The same thing happened in NH with both the polls right before the election and with the exit polls. Naturally though from an MSM POV it can't be "fraud", because by definition, there is no such thing as a "Bad Democrat" -- it takes a victory by a Republican to arouse suspicion.

While I don't tend to buy into this allegation either, it is interesting that a PRIMARY is especially ripe for voter fraud. Lots of Government employees run the polling places, and they are overwhelmingly Democrat. Easier to pull of fraud if you don't have someone that is likely to be suspicious of your actions looking over your shoulder.

Wireless Power

Click on the Blog link to go off to see a Blog from CES on wireless power. The idea would be that if your whole home (or some rooms) had wireless power, you would not have to remember to plug in your devices anymore, they would "just charge". If it was common enough in public places where you use your devices or commonly are (office, coffee shops, car, airport, etc) then you might be able to forget about charging all together!

The Laws of Simplicity

The subject book by John Maeda is a little book about a subject that is very important at the start of the 21st century. More about the subject can be found at www.LawsOfSimplicity.com.

The ten laws are:

1. Reduce - The simplest way to simplify
   
2. Organize - Makes more appear as less
   
3. Time - Saving time feels simpler
4. Learn - Knowledge simplifies all things
5. Differences - Simplicity and Complexity need each other (Wave function)
6. Context - What is peripheral is important
7. Emotion - More is better
8. Trust - You must trust the simplification
9. Failure - As in learning that it can't all be simpler
10. The One - Subtract the Obvious, add the Meaningful.
    

There are also three actions to be used to achieve these laws:

SHE: Shrink, Hide, Embody
BRAIN: Basics, Repeat, Avoid, Inspire, Never
SLIP: Sort, Label, Prioritize

The example of the Apple iPod is used very frequently throughout the book, and as a fairly recent convert to the "Apple Kool-aide", I agree that it is an excellent object lesson in the miracle of simplicity in the modern world. I need to get a Blog out on the Apple Experience here very soon, and when I do, I hope to link it.

The copy of this book that I read was borrowed from the company library, but my own copy is on order to be marked up, further understood and probably re-blogged.

Everything Is Miscellaneous

Finished the book by David Weinberger and at least for an information technology long-term Web denizen it wasn't all that enlightening, but it did name some concepts well I guess. The idea of "order of order"; 1st order is physical, how things are ordered on a shelf in a drawer or in a store, in the physical universe, you get a single order. The second order is "index order" or "map order"; the card catalog at the library being the classic example.

The third order of order is in some degree "disorder" in the human sense, but it is what the Net is all about. Freed from the physical limits of things like cards and paper maps we can link endlessly and order in any way we see fit. Playlists on iTunes, Google, Blogs, etc. Lots of focus on the commonly used tree structure of many of our classifications, with the example of the Linnaean classification of the world of living things, and how we are finding that it really isn't that tidy.

I wouldn't really recommend the book for anyone very serious about understanding the phenomenon of digitization and the Web. It might be a good intro, but it seemed too "Pop" to me.

Lion Hunting in Socialist Computer Utopia

The attempt to create a computer system with better graphics than reality hit a snag last night on the issue of Extended ATX vs ATX power supply. Our ASUS A8N-SLI Motherboard turns out to be “EATX”, so our super cool (and super complicated) Thermaltake Xaser V500D case is lacking a couple of pins of connector power. After massive perusal of Web, we have determined that either:

1). It makes no difference if not doing dual processors or graphics, just plug and go.
2). There is a simple “converter” that works just great, now on order for $10 and shipping

3). We need to go get a REAL EATX power supply, of which there are not many.

The “build your own computer” hobby has provided a lot of fun, and occasional significant head scratching over the years. This is one of those scratching times. The ASUS web site is amazing. It seems hard to imagine that we are the first to hit this particular snag on a MB install, yet there seems to be no mention of EATX, either in the manual or on the web. We ordered most the parts from Mwave, which I generally like, but a little bit of “cross checking” about a couple things like “did you really want to order a case with ATX power and a MB with EATX?” Would have been very helpful.

Such things would be nice, but sadly, as a programmer, I also know they are far from free. The specs aren’t well structured data, they change frequently, and the only way the software acquires the knowledge to ask is by an investment in real work.

After reading Zinn though, I now understand that the reason for this is not due to any facility of the universe that makes things complex, but rather due to the wealthy 1% of the US population conspiring to confuse us! In a 687 page death march of a book, Howard finally got to the part about how to do things better. The simplicity of it makes the horror of 100s of years of wasted humanity seem even more tragic.

“The society’s levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state – the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. We would need – by a coordinated effort of local groups all over the country – to reconstruct the economy for efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most.

We would start in our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplaces. Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the workforce – children, old people, “handicapped” people. Society would use the enormous energy now idle, the skills and talents now unused. Everyone would share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to be taken out of our money system and be available – free – to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, and transportation.”

“The great problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires, which in the past have been used by the state in times of war, but also by social movements that gave hints of how people might behave in different conditions. Decisions would be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods – a network of cooperatives, in communication with one another, a neighborly socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh dictatorships that have taken the name socialist”.

There you have it. We are close enough to nirvana that if we could take the controls away from the evil corporations and military, the basic non-competitive good nature of humans would take over with only the slight complexity of a bit of communication difficulty! I’m sure a tear is crossing your cheek right now as you consider the simplicity of it all, how close we are to bliss, and yet we have been denied entry to this paradise by our corrupt American system.

Power supply mismatches are just one very small example, but it is easy to see how the right thing would happen in Zinnworld. Little engineering conclaves, much like artist conclaves, would see their socialist brothers need for better graphics in first-person shooter games. After their “few hours” of joyful group labor providing “free” food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation to themselves and their just society, they would no doubt gather in an earthen hall to reach instant agreement on the proper standards for all manner of connections, voltages, and software parameters. I can almost hear a little socialist hymn to the benefits of agreement and sameness arising from their smiling lips as they power up the ultimate socialist game machine – there is no doubt in my mind it would be completely friendly to the environment and be the ultimate in human factors engineering as well!

It is completely breathtaking to me that after reaching the end of what I was beginning to fear was an endless diatribe against America, the family, private property, western civilization, religion, competition, capitalism, democracy, and countless other elements of our society, that “the answer” to all this is a thinly veiled threat of revolution against the system we live in, followed by two paragraphs of pabulum on some abstract utopia that bears no resemblance to anything that ever has, does, or is ever going to exist as long as nature and humans are involved.

Has Zinn really missed that competition was not exactly “created by man”? We may argue about HOW it was created, but it seems pretty obvious that it exists in nature as well as in human society. There is ONE way to make man give up the idea of personal property, and at least reduce the competition in the masses - it isn’t like it hasn’t been done before; Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. 

Zinn may not like the US, but it isn’t like the alternatives have exactly produced garden spots. It is too bad that Howard can’t spend some time in North Korea. The freedom to be paid by the state to criticize the state (university professor), and be the darling of “the permanent adversarial culture” (those that Howard hopes will eventually revolt) might look pretty inviting from a prison cell were he to try the same line of work there.

I suspect this book will kick me off into a few days of writing on what I consider the “fundamentals” of the left and right. While fortunately, over 50% of Americans would consider Howard’s ideas to be absurd (in the unlikely event that they submit to the torture of reading them), there is one thread through this book that should be taken seriously. Zinn is very much a cheerleader for violence from the left, and found the Vietnam years with their riots and bombings and lack of respect for American institutions to be very refreshing. 

This is a lull in politics, but guys like Zinn, and Chomsky are always out there, and not very far removed from men like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Harkin, and others. If you ever doubt that threats to America from people within our borders are real, and that revolution is still being preached on our own campuses, you need read no further than Howard Zinn. Fortunately, apparently even more than 50% of the teens have a better grasp on reality than Howard.

This is how he closes the book:

“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many; they are few!

Keep the right to bear arms! If the “lions” ever get out, shoot straight, and make sure you have plenty of ammo!