Posts by FrMo 8 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2013
Elon Musk and Tesla are getting an awful lot of opprobium for bringing out a series of practical electric cars which go most of the way to solving the technical difficulties which have held electric cars back for decades. This is crazy. They are (amongst others like Nissan and BMW) doing the world a service and should get credit for it.
What a relief! I was beginning to be worried about the possibility that climate change might be damaging the planet, but thankfully Andrew Orlovsky's put my mind at rest. All these silly windmills and solar panels will never power the country, and so we can all relax and burn fossil fuels as before.
I never thought of it in this way, but Andrew's right: just because there is not enough wind in England (hmmm, I wonder why he didn't say the UK), it follows that there is no climate change! I must alert the world.
In my experience, for all the achievements of Windows 10, Microsoft and Windows' turning point came around 2004. Mistakes it made then will be nigh on impossible fully to rectify. By early 2004 Redmond had squashed all resistance in desktop OS's, Office suites and, crucially, browsers. The desktop was still dominant - the iPhone was still 3 years away.
At that point, Firefox emerged from the ashes of Netscape. Microsoft could have strangled it at birth but, perhaps because of the transition from Gates to Balmer, Microsoft had its eye off the ball. Just about the only advantage Firefox had over IE6, the then latest version of IE, was that it had tabbed broswing and IE6 didn't. Apart from that, Firefox rendered many websites less well than IE, and was not available to many corporate users. If Microsoft had quickly put tabbed browsing into IE, Firefox might never have got off the ground, and Microsoft could have continued with its work of de-standardising the Internet by deliberately putting quirks into IE which websites would have been forced to accommodate because of IE's 91% market share (according to Net Applications). Over the next few years, the entire Internet might have passed into Microsoft's de-facto control. Websites would have been further optimised for IE, and Mircosoft would have had an advantage in designing server software to cope with the secret quirks put into IE. Apache, Linux and Java might all have been stunted.
Another big trick missed by Microsoft around this time was failure to put Office onto mobiles. If Microsoft had done that in 2004-7, it would have had a fair shot at eating Blackberry's lunch (corporate email would just have used Outlook for mobile), and Microsoft would have had an entrenched position to defend against the iPhone.
Instead, Microsoft waited nearly three years before introducing tabbed browsing with IE7, and chopped and changed its mobile OS while failing to get Office properly onto it. Firefox, then Chrome flourished, and the mobile stage was clear for Apple to take it by storm with the iPhone. From there, Microsoft lost its overwhelming dominance and it is now entirely possible now to build an organisation's IT infrastructure without any use of Microsoft products at all.
Whatever the future holds, it is unlikely to see a return to Microsoft's monopoly of most of the major areas of basic software any more than it is to see a return to dominance by IBM. That may be bad for Microsoft, but being shot of Microsoft's monopolies is surely good for the wider world of IT.
This question also occurred to me, so I went to the project's website and it repeated the misleading sentence,
"Nuclear fusion occurs when this plasma is compressed to high pressure with a magnetic field. The team has successfully tested this technique in the lab."
On reading it further it becomes clear that in their experiments NO FUSION HAS ACTUALLY TAKEN PLACE.
Yes it seems like a promising project, and it's exciting that it is getting funding, but if they can generate fusion in this way in any reasonable timescale, it will be Nobel Prizes and a place in the history books for them. A whiff of "too good to be true" indeed.
Er, what about Lehman? Bear Stearns? Investment banking practices did trigger the financial crisis. Shoddy credit analysis in the US sub prime sector caused a shutdown in the securitisation market worldwide. That in turn felled Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley and others in the UK, and in the US ultimately led to the collapse of Lehman and Bear Stearns. All this led to a wider crisis of confidence in the banking sector, causing credit to dry up suddenly and send many businesses (especially property developers) to the wall. Yes HBOS lent unwisely, but without the financial storm triggered by subprime it might well still be in business. HBOS may not have done much investment banking itself, but that does not mean investment banking had nothing to do with its fall.
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