Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep...?

The above is the title of the Philip K Dick novella from which Blade Runner took inspiration and, finally, we can now answer the question that it posed.

No, they don't.

Apparently, they dream of dog-fish, camel-birds and pig-snails...

Murphy's Law #94,000

Yes, I read Timmy regularly, so it's only inevitable that I should decide that we should look at tax-avoiding accountant Richard Murphy's latest prognostications, shall we?

Google is tax avoiding: by definition that means what they are doing is legal, of course. And it may even be that what Google is doing is within the spirit of EU law, although that is to simply miss the fact that EU tax laws have now been spectacularly rigged to advantage companies over people so that the spirit of the law has itself been corrupted.

But even that is not the real point of why Google needs to be in the dock over its tax. The real reasons is that Google has set itself the motto “don’t be evil”. That means that Google explicitly recognises it has choices about the way it does business. And by choosing to do business as Google does, in a way that ensures it pays little or no corporate tax on its vast profits earned outside the USA in almost any of the countries where they actually arise Google is saying it is willing to free-ride our economies.

What that means is that in my opinion Google is saying it has no interest in giving a return back to the societies that are letting it prosper.

That’s doing evil in my book.

Look, I am no stranger to calling Google out on its somewhat optimistic catchphrase; but—via Daring Fireball—let's just look at another side to the company, shall we?

Instead, Bock, who joined the company in 2006 after a stint with General Electric, blew me away by disclosing a never-before-made-public-perk: Should a U.S. Googler pass away while under the employ of the 14-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade. Even more surprising, a Google spokesperson confirms that there’s “no tenure requirement” for this benefit, meaning most of their 34 thousand Google employees qualify.

Now, someone like Richard Murphy will shriek and scream about this benefit. The money that is going to the widows of people who actually added value to the company—people like Murphy will say—is actually owned to the millions of people who have added fuck all to the company.

But that is because people like Richard Murphy are, in fact, fucking devil-spawn. They are scum-sucking shit-holes, fit only for fucking with the most rancid cocks; they are like a three-week dead vagina with maggots and an unhealthy cockroach infestation.

People like Richard Murphy—though not, necessarily, Richard Murphy himself, you understand—are evil little bastards who, having saved huge amounts of money through their own tax-avoidance practices, would now deprive a company's widows and children of benefits so that Barry Wiggins down the council estate can buy another mastiff.

To describe Richard Murphy as a disgusting, hypocritical little cunt with all the morals of a weasel would, you might think, be utterly beyond the pale. And, of course, I am not doing that.

I will merely let you draw your own conclusions...

Doing no evil

"Don't be evil" has always been the semi-official motto of Google—to those who believe in the company, it probably still is.

However, those of us in the tech industry have been highly sceptical (to say the least) for some time, and a couple of incidents have recently been thrown up that I would like to highlight.*

The Children's Furniture Company has recently gone out of business, directly blaming the change in Google's search algorithms for the decision.

As we are a purely web based business, it has always been important to be somewhere near the top of Google for keywords such as 'bunk beds' and 'childrens beds'. Google is where all our customers look and up until May, that's exactly where we were - page 1. To get to that slot is highly prized and competitive and over the past few years we have both advertised on Google and like many companies, used SEO specialists (Search Engine Optimisation as it's called), to help move us up the natural Google listings. A company we used about two years ago put some external links onto our site that Google now considers as webspam and for this it has demoted us to nowhere land (along with 1,000's of other businesses as well).

It seems that we cannot take these links off and the only option open is to completely rebuild the site. Sadly this would take too much time and too much money, whilst not being able to sell furniture at the same time. So as we couldn't see how people would find us; and as we were about to have to invest in a heap more stock, we decided that there was no option but to shut.

This state of affairs was brought to my attention by an SEO professional writing at SearchWatch.

Were the Children’s Furniture Company a good company? Who knows? Certainly not Google. Nor did they care. What is it to Google if they fufilled all their orders, had great customer satisfaction and a satisfactory range of products? The algorithm trumps all and thus customer choice is lessened and another few mouths are on the dole queue.

If you think that the Google of 2012 is a search engine, you’re fooling yourself. It is an advertising channel. It was only yesterday that a screengrab was doing the rounds showing that just 14% of a Google search result is made of organic listings. The rest? Adwords and Google’s own properties—YouTube, News, Shopping and so on. Throw in the increasing personalisation and localisation of results and tie-ins with review sites you’re left with not much space for the little guy. Even the long tail has been ceded to such “quality” sites as eHow and Yahoo! Answers leaving the middle ground for people to fight over the scraps that fall from the top table.

And maybe that’s fair enough. Businesses used to close all the time because they couldn’t afford to advertise during Coronation Street and no-one cried about it very much. That’s an expensive way to get in front of a million noses and get your brand known that was always closed to small business. If Tesco decided they were going to start selling paint and rollers, then your little round-the-corner DIY shop was often toast by the time the 3rd ad for Tesco Paint was on rotation during Hollyoaks.

Google was supposed to be different: a leveller. If you sold paint out of your little shack on the A650, you could go toe to toe with Wickes, B&Q; and any retailer in the world so long as you paid your dues, built a good site, offered good service and worked within Google’s guidelines. And for a while, that held up. It’s still the message they peddle.

But I think we can safely call bullshit on that notion now.

Indeed. And that is only to be expected: Google's responsibility is to its shareholders.

But there have been a number of actions by Google, in the last few years, that blow apart their claim to be an ethical company.

As I've said, those of us in the tech industry always thought that this "don't be evil" bullshit was... well, bullshit.

Let us be clear about this: Google is not primarily a technology firm.

Google derives 96% of its revenues from advertising: it is in Google's interests to provide you with free products, which enables it to show you adverts, which persuade you to buy its sponsors' products.

There is nothing wrong with this: and, assuming that I must be shown adverts, I would rather be shown adverts for products that I might be interested in.

However, in pursuit of this goal, Google has made a number of questionable technological and business decisions: decisions that might be understandable, but which most people would find difficult to reconcile with the company's "don't be evil" motto.

But what about Google's reputation as a hotbed of technological invention? Apart from its search—which is becoming more and more polluted by financial interests—what wonderful, successful technologies have they come up with recently?

Yes, GMail and Reader were built and deployed by Google themselves—and they remain very good products, integral to my daily workflow.

And I am writing this—ironic, I know—on a Google product. But Blogger was invented and deployed by others, and bought by Google.

I also use Feedburner—also invented by others and then bought by Google. And the same applies to YouTube.

Picasa? Mostly lost out to Flickr (and now, arguably, Instagram) but was, in any case, invented by Lifescape.

Google+...? Does anyone actually use it? Regularly?

What we did admire was the way that Google churned out good products: or bought them, made them freely available and improved them. But the reaction to Google's recent acquisition of Sparrow—a brilliant Mac OS email client—shows that even this reputation is at an end.

Daring Fireball has only this pithy comment to make:

Congratulations to the Sparrow guys, I guess, but this gives me The Fear for Sparrow’s future.

Sure enough, Sparrow will no longer be updated and developed. This is, as Matt Gemmell points out, a success for the Sparrow developers—its what, I imagine, they were aiming for. It is, nonetheless, an acquisition intended to shut down competition.

More damagingly, online tech magazine Boing Boing goes further—promoting this short but entertaining video.



The point that I am trying to make is that Google has lost whatever respect it had amongst many technologists—either for its technological prowess, or its radical attitude.

UPDATE: I knew I'd forgotten something—whoops! Android, of course, requires a post all of its own. However, there are two things to consider when assessing Google's way here:

1. Google loses money on Android.
2. Android looked very different before and after the launch of the iPhone.
3. Android is a massively fractured platform that, with every iteration, is demonstrating why the Apple "walled garden" ecosystem—and control over carriers—is, in my opinion, better for consumers.

I will address these points in more detail on a later post.

The other product raised is Chrome: this is a browser running on the Open Source WebKit rendering engine, that is sponsored by Google—but also by Apple and a number of other big corporations. It is not a Google-alone product any more than, for instance, Blogger is. Although the V8 Javascript engine is also worth discussing...

* I realise the irony of the fact that I am writing this on a Google product, and using a video hosted on another Google product.**

** I also realise that the irony is lessened slightly by the fact that Google did not invent or deploy these products—it bought them. Yes—all of them: Blogger, Feedburner and YouTube were all acquired, not invented, by Google.

Surface detail

As a Mac fan, you might be unsurprised to know that your humble Devil is pretty underwhelmed by Microsoft's new Surface tablet.* Although, to be fair, the video is not as cringe-inducingly embarrassing as Microsoft's usual promos.

It does underscore one important thing, of course—that Microsoft has understood that having control of both hardware and software makes it easier to create a great user experience. Further, Microsoft are trying to lock down some of the software elements too—restricting the choice of web browsers on the ARM version of Metro.

Anyway...

Many media outlets are hailing the Surface as Microsoft's competitor to the iPad. Whilst I think some serious competition to Apple's iPad is a good thing, I share Justin Watt's opinion that Microsoft is not, in fact, competing directly with the iPad as such.

Whilst I know from personal experience that people in businesses are loving their iPads and iPhones, as Justin points out, the "enterprise" IT-integrated iPad experience is very locked down—for reasons of "security", of course.

Basically, most IT departments that I have encountered are highly conservative at best: at worst, they can be lazy, hide-bound and arrogant. Personally, I think that many IT departments are signing their own death warrants**, but they will be around for a good long time yet.

Enterprise employees can be inspiring, but that depends on said enterprise that they work for. A place that fosters creativity, thinking outside the box, and new ideas leads to happy workers who are open to change if it means making their day to day routine more enjoyable. Let’s just say that having 30,000+ workers doesn’t make for an accomodating work environment for new ideas and embracing change. Integrating iOS and thinking of mobile development in parallel with desktop software development for this many users isn’t an easy or quick task and for that reason the Surface may succeed very well in the enterprise. It’s more of the same. Buried underneath that beautiful Metro interface is Windows. Pure Windows able to run that software developed in 1992, not needing Citrix remote desktop apps, and not needing 100’s of new apps bought to open Office documents that don’t format or display properly on iOS.

Goliath Wants Your Market

In enterprise, Apple is David. The Goliath in enterprise that is Microsoft wants Apple’s market in mobile enterprise. Apple hasn’t entrenched itself nearly deep enough in enterprise. Microsoft has the ability to successfully corner the mobile enterprise market just as it has with the desktop enterprise market. Goliath is bringing the Surface to the table and inside of the enterprise market, it has a fighting chance of succeeding.

I agree with this: the Surface will be largely adopted in enterprise environments.

Outside of enterprise, I think it’s a different story. I think the Surface will fail miserably, but that’s another post I intend on publishing later this week.

I'll look forward to that.

* For a start, there is no firm availability date, nor any indication of pricing.

** In the businesses that I work with, I am finding more and more CEOs and executives are becoming more tech-savvy. And, in all too many organisations, the IT departments are fighting the management.

The result: more and more outsourcing of entire IT functions. This is especially happening amongst many of the smaller, nimbler organisations but larger ones are also started to adopt this trend.

And, of course, if your IT supplier says that they won't support the CEO's shiny new iPad, then it is far easier to change them supplier than it is to fire your IT department.

Especially when more and more of your productive work environments are outsourced to web suppliers or Cloud applications.

Apple's Mac Pro update

At the World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC) yesterday, Apple released a slew of hardware upgrades.

Many of them look very impressive—not least the flagship retina display MacBook Pro. However, your humble Devil has always been a Mac Pro user—I require the expansion capabilities that the power tower offers—and, in this respect, I can only echo Shawn Blanc's comment...

Not much new — no USB 3.0 ports like the whole MacBook lineup got today, and still no Thunderbolt. Why did Apple even bother?

Quite. This is the first update that the Mac Pro has had in two years, and Apple have elected to omit all of the pro hardware features.

I would like to think that Apple have given the standard model a small speed bump, and little else, simply to keep sales going whilst they prepare for a massively revised model later in the year.

However, I fear that this is not the case. Instead, this derisory update lends credence, I think, to the rumours of the Mac Pro's imminent demise.

UPDATE: I may have called that too soon. Via Daring Fireball, I see that MacWorld reports that a customer sent an email to Apple CEO Tim Cook, essentially stating something similar to the above, and Cook replied thusly:

Franz,
Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We also updated the current model today.
We’ve been continuing to update Final Cut Pro X with revolutionary pro features like industry leading multi-cam support and we just updated Aperture with incredible new image adjustment features.
We also announced a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that is a great solution for many pros.
Tim

This is good news.

Regardless of the actual state of the hardware, I love that Apple executives reply to their customers directly like this: Steve Jobs did the same thing.

As far as I am concerned, if the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company can be bothered to respond to a customer via personal email, that is indicative of great customer service across the company.

UPDATE 2: to compound my annoyance, the latest OS X version—Mountain Lion—will not run on my 2006 Mac Pro. So it looks like I shall have to wait until next year until I can upgrade both hardware and software.

The problem with healthcare

Some of you might have noticed that there is a lively debate going on in the US Supreme Court over the so-called Obama-care Programme. Whilst the wife has been avidly reading the transcripts—with some interest, outrage and amusement—we have been debating the more general point of how healthcare is delivered.

It's a tricky subject—not least because it is emotive and, as such, tends to give rise to bad headlines for politicians when the inevitable rationing happens. Because the really big problem with all healthcare systems is that there simply isn't enough money to pay for what is desired (if not absolutely required).

All of these debates about the actual delivery and payment of healthcare—both here and in the US—simply doesn't address the basic problem of healthcare being massively expensive. I would like to posit some reasons, and put forward some hopes of solutions.

The first pressing problem is that healthcare services are extremely prone to Baumol's cost disease.

In line with the government’s 2% inflation target, the Treasury’s assumption is that productivity in the economy as a whole will rise at 2% a year and pay at an average of 4%. Hence, if pay in the public services is to remain competitive with that outside, it must rise on average by about 4% a year. So to be able to afford the same number of staff in any particular service, expenditure also needs to go up by 4% a year – a “real increase” of 2%. The problem for services, such as health and education, and for the armed forces, is that they need such a “real increase” to keep the same number of staff to maintain existing standards, because there is little or no room for improving productivity.

As Timmy points out, there are ways to mitigate for this—particularly in how services are delivered.

The reason being that productivity in services is merely more difficult to improve, not impossible. Only if you say that a near monolothic organisation of 1.4 million people is the most efficient manner of delivering health care to 60 million people can you say that the NHS productivity cannot be improved. And that certainly ain’t an argument I’m going to try and make.

One obvious method of improving efficiency would be to abolish national pay bargaining... but no one has the balls to try that as yet unfortunately.

There were rumours that Osborne was going to do so in this budget and certainly is seems that the government is moving that way. And there is no doubt that the NHS could be run more efficiently—especially if the providers were not run by the government and thus had some efficient way of measuring quality.

One of the biggest goals in healthcare service delivery must be to adopt the strategy of manufacturing and remove, as far as possible, as many people from the delivery as possible. Now, there are many ways to do this, but one of the most exciting is to harness new technologies as much as possible—like, for instance, being able tobuild new organs or even print new kidneys (truly amazing video)!



Just think: although it's still a prototype (both printer and organ), that machine can print a new kidney in seven hours. And that kidney can be printed from the recipient's cells.

Just consider the cost reductions over conventional treatment—no cost of keeping the patient on dialysis for months or years whilst waiting for a donor; no surgical teams required to remove the organs from the donor; no need to go through the whole thing again to replace the organ after ten years; no drugs required to deal with rejection nor having to treat the patient for the panoply of diseases inevitable with immunosuppressant therapies.

We are on the cusp of a healthcare revolution—where technology really can start to make healthcare delivery cheaper.

One of the other big costs is drugs, and this is largely a political problem. To make you marvel and to illustrate this point, I'd like to introduce you to bexarotene. Bexarotene is a cancer drug that has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for a decade (this is important later on).

Now, bexarotene has been shown to be immensely effective in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease—not only can it slow it, but it seems likely that the drug can actually reverse the effects.

In the study described below, the cancer drug Bexarotene quickly and dramatically improved brain function and social ability and restored the sense of smell in mice bred with a form of Alzheimer's disease.
...

Within hours of taking the drug, amyloid plaques began to clear out of the mice’s brains. After three days, more than 50 percent of the Alzheimer’s plaques had disappeared, and the mice regained some of the cognitive and memory functions typically lost in Alzheimer's disease.
...

Neuroscientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have made a dramatic breakthrough in their efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers’ findings, published in the journal Science, show that use of a drug in mice appears to quickly reverse the pathological, cognitive and memory deficits caused by the onset of Alzheimer’s. The results point to the significant potential that the medication, bexarotene, has to help the roughly 5.4 million Americans suffering from the progressive brain disease.

Sounds pretty cool, yes? Alzheimer's is not only an incredibly expensive disease to treat, it is extremely distressing.

When I worked as an Auxiliary Nurse in a medical centre, I saw people with progressive brain disorders such as Alzheimer's. One woman was nothing more than a still moving shell of a human being—no thinking human being existed inside her. She simply wandered about making a soft ululation day after day: when she got to a wall, like a wind-up toy, she just kept walking and walking against the wall.

Another time, I had to comfort a twelve year old boy because his father no longer recognised him. These patients had been there for years—at a cost of more than £1k a week—and would be there for years more.

A drug that could stop all of this would be amazing. But there are a couple of problems.

First, bexarotene is pretty expensive.

How much does Targretin (Bexarotene) cost?

Targretin is a tier 5 drug, this means it is very expensive. An Internet search indicated that 30, 75mg capsules cost $1,156.64.

Now, we might guess that this is probably still considerably less than £1,000 a week (minimum) in a nursing home but actually we don't know—and herein lies the rub.

Despite being approved for the treatment of cancer at specified doses, bexarotene, and the dosage, would need to be re-approved by the FDA for the treatment of Alzheimer's. And, as we all know, that kind of testing costs a lot of cash.

Will the drug company stump up for it? No. Why? Because bexarotene is about to come out of patent.

Unfortunately, the drug is going to have to go through several rounds of clinical testing before the drug is approved for Alzheimer's. This will takes years.

Will the drug ever get tested and get approved by the FDA for Alzheimer's? The current drug Targretin is scheduled to lose its patent in 2016. So, in order for Targretin to be financed into a Phase 3 clinical trial it will need to be re-engineered and re-patented to make the numbers work. In other words, it is unlikely that anyone is going to step up and finance the testing of a drug that is likely to be an available generic by the time it is approved for Alzheimer's patients.

And there we have the big problem with drug development.

It takes something like 8 years and $600 million to get a drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of humans. Those are big numbers, and it is why we have Big Pharma. I know a couple of people in Edinburgh who run small drug research labs; when they find something promising, they sell the patent to Big Pharma because only big corporations have the colossal amounts of cash required to get a drug to market.

And the patent life for a drug is, if I recall correctly, about 14 years. So, you spend 8 years bringing a drug to market and then you have about 6 years to recoup over half a billion dollars. As the Americans would say, you do the math.

This problem is only going to get worse as we move towards personalised treatments; if the regulatory agencies insist that every drug tailored to an individual—because that is the kind of breakthrough that we are looking at—need to go through this kind of approval process, then we may as well kiss tailored treatment goodbye.

There needs to be a fundamental rethinking of drug regulation: either it needs to be relaxed, or the patent life needs to be extended.

So, both technology and relaxed regulation can play a part in ensuring that we—the customer—get more healthcare for our limited resources, i.e. cash. But, you can bet that these innovations will be fought tooth and nail.

The medical establishment and the unions will fight to the bitter end to protect their own interests—as we have seen with the Healthcare Bill in this country. After all, the bastards of the BMA were happy to destroy the Friendly Societies and oppose the NHS because they believed that each of them were opposed to doctors' interests—they couldn't care less about patients and never have. The same applies to all of the other trades unions.

And governments love their regulation, oh yes. And so do big corporations because they are set up to deal with them. The people who lose out are... well... we poor idiots who pay for it all.

Technology will make us freer, happier and richer than ever before: the forces of conservatism will stop that if they can...

Quote of the Day...

... comes from Nat Torkington, via Daring Fireball.

Tech Giant IPOs are like Royal Weddings: the people act nice but you know it's a seething roiling pit of hate, greed, money, and desperation that goes on a bit too long so by the end you just want to put an angry chili-covered porcupine in everyone's anus and set them all on fire. But perhaps I'm jaded.

Poetry...

Do you trust...

... governments and huge corporatist multinationals? No, nor do I.



PIPA and SOPA are stupid, dangerous acts that threaten the internet. And this comes from someone who, by and large, supports Intellectual Property rights...

Smartphone makers...

... in negotiations with mobile phone network carriers:

Android handset makers: Here are our phones. How would you like us to change them so that you will sell them?

Microsoft: Here’s $200 million. Please sell our phones.

Apple: Here is our new phone. It comes in black or white. We will let you sell it.

Haha...

Toodle-oo Yahoo

Those of us in the web industry have been watching the travails of Yahoo with a bemused amusement*. For years, the one-time search pioneer has been flailing around, trying to define what it is—precisely—that it does.

Now it seems that the board has got fed up and fired CEO Carol Bartz—by telephone.

Yahoo shares jumped more than 6% in after-hours trading after news of the firing broke, indicating they would trade higher when Wall Street opened for business on Wednesday. Yahoo's stock price was up at $13.72, an increase of 81 cents.

Obviously things are worse than we thought since, according to Business Insider, the board are also letting people know that the company is up for sale.

In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale.

The person who briefed the Wall Street Journal on the Bartz firing also told the paper that "Yahoo is open to selling itself to the right bidder."

That's the equivalent of sticking a FOR SALE sign on the lawn.

Business Insider is also pretty harsh about Bartz—justifiably so.

The board canned Bartz, the WSJ's sources say, after studying the company's assets for two weeks and concluding that Bartz was doing a lousy job. If this is really true, one wonders what on earth the board has been doing for the past two years, while pretty much everyone else concluded the same thing.

Indeed. I think that the suggested solution falls short of the mark though...

There's no quick fix for Yahoo. The company needs to embrace the fact that it's now a media, content, and communications company—and make heavy investments in those areas. It needs to radically streamline itself. And it needs a leader with a clear product vision and the ability to execute on it.

If Yahoo is a "media, content and communications company", then it needs to find a strong revenue stream—something that online content companies often struggle to find.

It also needs to find greater acceptance for its—actually quite cool—developer applications and libraries amongst the web programming community.

I just don't think that those running Yahoo have the first clue on how to do either. And if the company has, indeed, put itself up for sale, it is going to made it even harder to find a CEO who does.

* The only more entertaining technology firm car-crash that I can currently think of is Hewlett-Packard. Take, for instance, this WSJ article which regales the management shenanigans at HP, under the subject line of "Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it..."

Jobs done

So, the day has finally come: Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple.

PRESS RELEASE: Letter from Steve Jobs

August 24, 2011–To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

It has become increasingly obvious, over the last few years, that Jobs's illness has taken an increasing toll on his health—and one does not have to read between the lines to understand that Jobs's failing health is the major driver for this resignation.



Pancreatic cancer has a very bad prognosis—it killed the 32-year old Bill Hicks in very short order (as well as many, many others)—and the Whipple Procedure (which Jobs originally took a leave of absence to undergo a few years ago) is, in itself, pretty radical. I last saw Jobs when he introduced the WWDC keynote back in early June: although he was enthusiastic, he looked pretty frail.

Jobs has taken Apple from being, as he put it, "90 days from bankruptcy" in the mid-90s—when I bought my very first Mac—to, at one point this month, the biggest company in the world (by market capitalisation). Indeed, at the end of July, it was reported that Apple had more cash in the bank than the US Federal Government—which is pretty good going.

To those of us who follow Apple with a near-fanatical zeal, it has been obvious for some time that the company was putting in place a transition plan. Over the last few years, each successive keynote has seen more presentations from the likes of Scott Forstall, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller and Tim Cook—even when Jobs has, theoretically, been back at full fitness. For watchers of the company, this moment has been long anticipated and, whilst not welcome news, we can at least be confident that Apple has—as Jobs puts it in his letter—a "succession plan". And, indeed, Tim Cook has been named CEO.

Whilst former COO Cook may not have Jobs's imagination, he is an immensely competent administrator and has been handling much of the day-to-day running of Apple since he joined the company in 1998. Indeed, it was Cook who took over as temporary CEO when Steve Jobs took a leave of absence, for surgery, in 2004.

Jobs has not entirely left the company: he takes over as Chairman of Apple and it is to be hoped that Jobs's vision will continue to drive the company for as long as he is able. Personally I fear that it may not be for too much longer, but I hope that I am wrong. Because Steve Jobs is a genius.

As I have been saying for sometime—paraphrasing the great Bill Hicks—the fact that we live in a world where Steve Jobs is dying of cancer, but Bill Gates coooooontinues to enjoy his ill-deserved wealth shows that there really is no god*.

In the meantime, I expect Apple to go from strength to strength, and to continue to produce great machines that I can use to actually get my work done—rather than having to fuck about with bollocks like Create A New Network Place.

I salute you, Steve Jobs, and wish you many more years of creating beautiful things.

*UPDATE: just to clarify, for those with a nastier frame of mind than myself, I am not wishing death on Bill Gates. I am simply pointing out that the fact that Gates is not ill and, if there were any justice in the world, Jobs would also not be dying of cancer. 'Kay? 'Kay. Good.

UPDATE 2: John Gruber at Daring Fireball comes to pretty much the same conclusion, but makes the interesting point that Jobs's creation is not really any one product.

Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.

Quite.

Identify the browser...

... a most amusing game sourced from The Art of Trolling.



Well, it made me giggle. And then, when I have to debug that bastard toilet again tomorrow, it will make me smile in between the bouts of incandescent rage...

Internet Explorer users are...

The mark of an idiot (apparently).

... according to Timmy, rather less intelligent than the general population. To put it kindly.

However...

There is one nagging feeling at the back of my mind though. It was revealed just last week that all British government computer systems must work and only work within IE6.

The trouble is that this simply isn't true: the Department of Health urged all NHS organisations to move away from IE6 and Windows XP back in February 2010.

The Department of Health (DoH) has urged all NHS staff still using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to upgrade to version 7 of the browser as soon as possible.
...

Microsoft has since issued an out-of-band security patch for IE6 to address the issue, while the Cabinet Office has issued an advisory to Government departments on update from the browser.

And now, in a four-page bulletin (PDF) issued by the department's informatics directorate, the DoH's staff have been urged to take action to ward off potential “reputational damage”.

Staff are warned that the vulnerability could allow cyber criminals “to download and install further malware/spyware on to the computer, add user accounts to the computer [and] steal sensitive data held locally and centrally”.

The warning continues:

“It is also possible that exploiting this vulnerability could allow for the compromised computer to be used as a ‘staging point’ for further attacks against other computer systems including those outside of the organisation.

“If an organisation has systems compromised via this vulnerability, there may be consequential reputational damage, especially if sensitive data is affected or the compromised system is used to attack other systems.”

Employees and departments have been urged to act quickly, at the very least to apply Microsoft's newly issued patch, but also to look at upgrading the browser itself.

“It is recommended that this update is applied to all affected computers within an organisation. Organisations should ensure that appropriate levels of testing of the update take place prior to mass deployment," the guidance adds.

“It is additionally further recommended that organisations still using Internet Explorer 6 on the affected platforms upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. [It] has been warranted to work correctly with Spine applications such as CSA and provides additional security features over Internet Explorer 6.”

Despite Microsoft's own recommendation that users upgrade to IE8, the NHS instead advises only the step up to IE7—recognition of the reality of just how out of date many public systems are.

Despite this, many NHS systems are still running on Windows XP and IE6—in defiance of the government's guidelines and standard safety procedures. Indeed, Ed Bott at ZDNet opines that...

Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice.

But what the hell—it's only our most sensitive data that they are putting at risk, eh?

However, I suspect that it is not as simple as Timmy makes out: in our company, all of our websites are designed to work in IE6 (or to degrade gracefully) but the administration (back-end) areas do not support IE6—only IE7 and above (and we recommend the use of Chrome Frame for a faster, more beautiful experience (without losing control)).

At least, I sincerely hope that this is the case...

Scientists hoist by their own petard

Now, as we all know, there is a pressing problem that we have—all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the planet and we are all going to fry unless we severely reduce our output of said gas.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the effective ways of generating the energy that makes our world go round emit CO₂ to a large extent; but, so severe is the problem, our politicians have responded to the urging of the scientific experts and put in place a number of measures to make carbon emission—and thus energy generation—much more expensive.

Now, do remember that this is all climate scientists because, of course, there is a "consensus" on the climate change topic. And almost all other scientists have urged us to listen to the climate scientists because they know what they are talking about and we laymen—even those who have a rather more specialist knowledge of statistical analysis or computer model programming—have no idea at all.

So, basically, we can say that the vast majority of the world's scientists back urgent action on carbon emissions: energy must be made much more expensive. Oh, wait, we didn't mean for us!

World-class research into future sources of green energy is under threat in Britain from an environmental tax designed to boost energy efficiency and drive down carbon emissions, scientists claim.

Some facilities must find hundreds of thousands of pounds to settle green tax bills, putting jobs and research at risk.

Altogether now... Aaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha! Aaaaahahahaha! Ah-ha! Ha!

Wait—let me catch my breath.

Aaaaaaaaaahaahahahahahahahaa! Aaaaaahahaha.

Whew.

Right. I... Aaaaahahaha. Ha.

OK, no, really, I'm sorry. I haven't laughed that much since Chris Huhne admitted that he drove a car.

Anyway, so, what are these scientists going to do? Could it be that they are going to cough up gladly, pointing out that this is precisely the outcome that they wanted? Ah, no.

The unexpected impact of the government's carbon reduction commitment (CRC) scheme is so severe that scientists and research funders have lobbied ministers for an exemption to reduce the bills.

No, absolutely not.

Alright, I admit that a good deal of the satisfaction of the above is based purely on spite: you bastards (as in the scientific community) insisted that we take action on climate change—and you got it. I don't see why everyone but you should suffer.

Yes, it might seem counter-intuitive that government-funded initiatives should have to pay government taxes (in the same way that it might seem odd that government-funded jobs need to pay taxes) but there are, as Timmy points out, a couple of valid reasons (i.e. ones not based on spite) why scientists should not be exempt.

1. It would be a subsidy. And we want subsidies to be out in the open. We want to be able to add up what whatever rule or regulation, tax or charge, actually costs us. So we don’t want any hidden subsidies at all. This applies to everything: council house rents should be full market rents, even if that means everyone gets housing benefit. We can then look at the benefit bill and see how much housing the poor costs us. Trains and farmers should pay full whack on fuel duty, even if that means we then have to send them a cheque to compensate. We want to be able to see, exactly, what their subsidy is.


2. We absolutely do not want things run by politicians and bureaucrats to be free of the rules politicians and bureuacrats impose upon the rest of us. It’s our only hope of reducing the complexities, that they have to struggle with their impositions as we do. Note the screams from MPs as their expenses are doled out in the same manner the dole is doled out. Quite bloody right too.

But it is very entertaining, nonetheless, to listen to the various sob stories highlitedby the Grauniad article...

Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, a facility for research into almost limitless carbon-free energy. The lab faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that."

And that is different from other businesses how, exactly?

Oh, by the way, you're flogging a dead horse: you may have the largest fusion reactor in Europe but if it actually generated, you know, any electricity then you could offset the costs, eh? But it doesn't.

Another Oxfordshire laboratory, the Diamond synchrotron light source, expects a £300,000 bill under the CRC. A spokesman said the lab hoped to offset the bill by investing in better climate control and motion-sensitive lighting.

Well, that's what the government is telling private businesses to do—why should it not apply to these scientist types?

At the Daresbury laboratory in Cheshire, the CRC bill will worsen financial woes that have forced managers to draft redundancy packages and consider cutting back on equipment. "Science is already struggling here and now we are being charged an additional premium to go about our everyday business while working to address the government's own stated grand challenges in science for the 21st century.," said Lee Jones, an accelerator physicist at the laboratory.

Well, we are all doing that, Lee: after all, some of us have to try to "address the government's own stated grand challenges" for GDP growth over the next five years—also in the face of rising costs and taxes.

So, with all due respect, o science types, you can take your exemption and stuff it up your pontificating arseholes.

Quantum computing

Via Dale Amon at Samizdata, I see that D-Wave have made the world's first commercial sale of a quantum computer.

On Wednesday, D-Wave Systems made history by announcing the sale of the world's first commercial quantum computer. The buyer was Lockheed Martin Corporation, who will use the machine to help solve some of their "most challenging computation problems." Lockheed purchased the system, known as D-Wave One, as well as maintenance and associated professional services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

D-Wave One uses a superconducting 128-qubit (quantum bit) chip, called Rainier, representing the first commercial implementation of a quantum processor. An early prototype, a 16-qubit system called Orion, was demonstrated in February 2007. At the time, D-Wave was talking about future systems based on 512-qubit and 1024-qubit technology, but the 128-qubit Rainier turned out to be the company's first foray into the commercial market.

According to D-Wave co-founder and CTO Geordie Rose, D-Wave One, the technology uses a method called "quantum annealing" to solve discrete optimization problems. While that may sound obscure, it applies to all sorts of artificial intelligence-type applications such as natural language processing, computer vision, bioinformatics, financial risk analysis, and other types of highly complex pattern matching.

As the subsequent interview with Geordie Rose reveals, proof that quantum computing is actually being undertaken by the chip was demonstrated in a Nature paper recently (£); further, Google—whose engineers worked with D-Wave on some of the software components—have also published some information on how the system has been used.

All of this is pretty impressive, but don't expect such technology to come to the consumer market in the near future: in operation the machine needs some 15 kilowatts of energy—not least because the chip needs to operate at near absolute zero—and the box's footprint is about 100 square feet!

Still, it's good to see that such mind-boggling technology can be produced—and by the private sector too*...

UPDATE: Counting Cats comments on this development in terms of its application to cryptography.

* Yes, this is a dig at all those idiots who think that only governments can invest ton of cash into scientific research.

More Polywell news

Plasma shines within EMC2's WB-7 device...

Via the IEC Fusion Technology blog, after the recent coy confirmation of continuance, there has been some more positive news on the Polywell fusion reaction front. [Emphasis mine.]

A Navy-funded effort to harness nuclear fusion power reports that its unconventional plasma device is operating as designed and generating "positive results" more than halfway through the project.
...

So how far along is EMC2? The current experiment is known as WB-8, which follows up on WB-5, 6 and 7. "WB" stands for "Wiffle Ball," which describes the spherical swiss-cheese look of the plasma containment cage. The $7.9 million contract covers work to see whether Bussard's fusion concept can be scaled up to a size capable of putting out more power than it consumes.
...

But based on the experiments so far, Park thinks there's a chance that it could be done in a sufficiently large Wiffleball reactor, costing on the order of $100 million to $200 million. That sounds like a pretty good deal, especially in comparison with the $3.5 billion that's been spent so far on fusion research at the National Ignition Facility and the $20 billion expected to be spent on the international ITER fusion project.
...

"It's a very nice machine," he said. "I like what we have so far. It's quite well-built, relatively flexible to actually explore a lot of areas and find what's best. Achieving the plasma for fusion is obviously a tall order. ... You don't just push the pedal on a Ferrari and drive the car. Like an F-18 or a stealth bomber, you have to learn how to operate it properly."
...

Park figures that the money provided under the WB-8 contract should last until the end of the year, depending on how efficiently the EMC2 team is able to stretch the money out. By then, the engineers in New Mexico and their backers in the Navy should know whether it's worth going ahead with the next step, perhaps even with the big demonstration reactor. Park hopes that WB-8 will be the last small-scale experimental machine EMC2 will have to build.

"This machine should be able to generate 1,000 times more nuclear activity than WB-7, with about eight times more magnetic field," said Park, quoting the publicly available information about WB-8. "We'll call that a good success. That means we're on track with the scaling law."

As Park points out, EMC2 cannot be too open about their work since their customer—the US Navy—has stipulated some degree of secrecy. However, all parties seem to be quietly confident...

So, onwards and upwards!

Polywell fusion news

As Samizdata's Dale Amon has reported, there has been some news on the Polywell Fusion reactor: well, it is not so much news of progress, but news that progress is continuing.

The Polywell experiment—conducted by EMC2—is currently running at WB8–8.1, with the awarding contract details shown here.

RECOVERY-- Research Development Test Evaluation (RDT&E;) Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) project. The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake has awarded a Cost Plus Fixed Fee contract for research, analysis,
development, and testing to validate the basic physics of the plasma fusion (polywell) concept as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) and options for a modified wiffleball 8 (WB8.1) and modified ion gun.

The progress is reported on the US contracts progress page (for all its problems, the US government makes Cameron's promises of transparency look like the obfuscating arse-wibble that it is), which reports that the project is "More than 50% Completed". So, no research continues and no massive barriers have yet been found.

It's also worth reading some of the comments at the Talk Polywell boards—a forum on which R Nabel, currently heading the EMC2 experiments, often posts.

Related posts on Polywell can be found here: Polywell reactor

Our generation will go to space...

Don't tell me that the concept of a space elevator doesn't fill you with thrills...

Some years ago (checking my archives, I find it was actually way back in 2006), I championed Liftport's Space Elevator programme, believing that—amongst other things—the whole concept was incredibly cool. Although they ran into difficulties at one point, Liftport is still going and still keeping the space elevator dream alive.

There are times when the world conspires to remind you of certain things, are there not? I have just started re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars—which features a space elevator—and now I have just stumbled across this fantastically enthusiastic post over at Counting Cats.

In 1995 I started my MSc in astrophysics (yeah, I have a dog in this fight but mine really is worthwhile—do I need to say why? If so I have lost you and you can grab your coat on the way out and basically I hope the door doesn’t bang your arse) at Queen Mary, London. I met a Spaniard there and you know what? She’d only written her undergrad dissertation on the space elevator! I was like wow! I really was. The idea, like so many others, like the Silbervogel or whatever had just been in the aether (which Einstein demonstrated doesn’t so much not exist as just not matter—ouch!).

Whether or not great minds think alike is irrelevant. Competent ones can do and we were far from alone. Both Agnetha and I had dreamed independently of something grand and this was not the meeting in a pub in Stepney of two geniuses. It was better than that for it was written on a beer mat. It was simply the realisation that it could be done and that we were not alone in conceiving this scheme. Yeah, I know it was not original but it honestly had been to me and her. That is my point. If the idea can occur without separate cause to the likes of me or Agnetha then…

… Maybe it’s a good one. Not an Earth-shaker. Not a Quantum Mechanics or whatever but basically, physically, (the engineering is as ever something else—I have have the greatest respect for engineers—they make dreams real—and that is way cool) absolutely obvious.

NickM finishes his post with this extraordinary video: it seems that the designs have not much changed since those that I saw in 2006, but the technology has finally arrived. It's time...


So, so cool...

Classic bait and switch

Following on from my last post about Google's non-release of Android "Honeycomb", it seems that the company have quite neatly bent the mobile phone companies over a barrel and begun screwing them royally...

Playtime is over in Android Land. Over the last couple of months Google has reached out to the major carriers and device makers backing its mobile operating system with a message: There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google's purview. From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google's most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans. And they will seek that approval from Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android group.

John Gruber sums up what this means, whilst also claiming that he "saw this coming all along"...

So here’s the Android bait-and-switch laid bare. Android was “open” only until it became popular and handset makers dependent upon it. Now that Google has the handset makers by the balls, Android is no longer open and Google starts asserting control.

I pass no judgement on Google's behaviour—it is, after all, a business: what does amuse me is the fact that so many people somehow thought that Google wasn't...

Open

One of the things that makes Google so super—as compared to, say, Apple—is that all its software is "open source".

Apart from its search algorithms. Obviously.

Oh, and Honeycomb—the latest version of its Android operating system.

Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple's iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones.

As John Gruber notes...

Guess we need a new definition of “open”.

Snigger...