Summing up Steve Jobs

Posted on by

What turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet was that Jobs did more than just create cool new devices. Rather he presided over the creation of new market ecosystems, with those devices at their heart. And if the ecosystems were more chaotic than he might have liked, they were also more powerful and more profitable. It’s true that, by the standards of today’s open source computing world, Apple’s platforms are still very much closed… But, by the standards of its old ethos, Apple is much more open than one would ever have thought possible. In giving up a little control, Jobs found a lot more power.

James Surowiecki, “How Steve Jobs Changed”, The New Yorker, 17 October, 2011, p.29.

Oh — you mean that 55 billion

Posted on by

Lovely story on BBC News.

Germany has found itself 55bn euros ($78bn; £48bn) richer after discovering an accounting error at Hypo Real Estate (HRE), the troubled bank it nationalised in 2009.

The country now expects its ratio of debt to GDP to be 81.1% for 2011, 2.6 percentage points lower than previously forecast, the finance ministry said.

The miscalculation was at the so-called bad bank of HRE, FMS Wertmanagement.

The discovery was made earlier this month but only announced on Friday.

FMS will contribute about 161bn euros to Germany’s debt this year, compared with 216.5bn in 2010.

How to torpedo a Presidential candidate

Posted on by

Terrific analysis by the Political Editor of the Irish Times of how Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness comprehensively destroyed Sean Gallagher, the front-runner in the Irish presidential election, and handed the election to Michael D. Higgins.

The critical passage in the TV debate is here.

Rage against the machine

Posted on by

Good editorial in this week’s Economist. Excerpt:

To the man-in-the-street, all this smacks of a system that has failed. Neither of the main Western models has much political credit at the moment. European social democracy promised voters benefits that societies can no longer afford. The Anglo-Saxon model claimed that free markets would create prosperity; many voters feel instead that they got a series of debt-fuelled asset bubbles and an economy that was rigged in favour of a financial elite, who took all the proceeds in the good times and then left everybody else with no alternative other than to bail them out. To use one of the protesters’ better slogans, the 1% have gained at the expense of the 99%.

If the grievances are more legitimate and broader than previous rages against the machine, then the dangers are also greater. Populist anger, especially if it has no coherent agenda, can go anywhere in times of want. The 1930s provided the most terrifying example. A more recent (and less frightening) case study is the tea party. The justified fury of America’s striving middle classes against a cumbersome state has in practice translated into a form of obstructive nihilism: nothing to do with taxes can get through Washington, including tax reform.

John McCarthy RIP

Posted on by

John McCarthy has died. Good obit by Jack Schofield in the Guardian tonight.

In 1955, the computer scientist John McCarthy, who has died aged 84, coined the term “artificial intelligence”, or AI. His pioneering work in AI – which he defined as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" – and robotics included the development of the programming language Lisp in 1958. This was the second such high-level language, after Fortran, and was based on the idea of computing using symbolic expressions rather than numbers.

McCarthy was also the first to propose a “time-sharing” model of computing. In 1961, he suggested that if his approach were adopted, “computing may some day be organised as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility,” and that that utility could become the basis of a significant new industry. This is the way that ‘cloud computing’ is being sold today.

However, when obliged to choose between the time-sharing work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and AI, he chose AI. He said: “The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However, many people involved in particular research areas are much less ambitious.”