Concepts at dawn

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Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece about the public spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn.

The feud is escalating into philosophy’s equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. In one corner is McGinn, 57, West Hartlepool-born professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and the self-styled hard man of philosophy book reviewing. In the other corner is Honderich, 74, Ontario-born Grote Professor Emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, and a man once described by fellow philosopher Roger Scruton as the “thinking man’s unthinking man”. They are using all the modern weapons at their disposal – blogs, emails, demands for compensation from the academic journal that published the original review, an online counter-review, and an online counter-counter-review…

Bricks ‘n Mortar 2.0

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Katie Hafner has some interesting stats on Apple’s retail venture. She visited the Apple Store in Midtown Manhattan at 2am and found it humming.

The party inside that store and in 203 other Apple stores around the world is one reason the company’s stock is up nearly 135 percent for the year. By contrast, high-flying Google is up about 52 percent, while the tech-dominated Nasdaq index is up 12 percent.

The popularity of the iPhone and iPod and the intended halo effect those products have had on sales of Apple computers are behind Apple’s vigor. But the company’s success in retailing, as other competitors struggle to eke out sales growth, has been the bonus.

Apple now derives 20 percent of its revenue from its physical stores. And the number is growing. In the fourth quarter in 2007, which ended Sept. 30, Apple reported that the retail stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues, a 42 percent increase over the fourth quarter in 2006.

Creative destruction

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Walking down Magdalene Street this evening I was depressed to find that one of my favourite establishments — a lovely secondhand bookshop — had gone. I guess its lease was up and the landlord (Magdalene College in all probability) proposed a whopping increase. This is why Cambridge is increasingly being denuded of ‘real’ shops and is now crammed with the kind of ludicrous boutiques which are the only enterprises that can pay the exorbitant rents demanded by the colleges.

What happens when executives make technological decisions

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An interesting angle on why the BBC is having technical difficulties, written by someone who seems to be a former BBC engineer.

The problem is that the BBC doesn’t control its own technical infrastructure. In an act of staggering short-sightedness it was outsourced to Siemens as part of a much wider divesting of the BBC Technology unit. In typical fashion for the BBC, they managed to select a technology supplier without internet operations experience. We can only assume that this must have seemed like an acceptable risk to the towering intellects running the BBC at the time. Certainly the staff at ground level knew what this meant, and resigned en masse.

Several years later this puts the BBC in the unenviable situation of having an incumbent technology supplier which takes a least-possible-effort approach to running the BBC’s internet services. In my time at the BBC, critical operational tasks were known to take days or even weeks despite a contractual service level promising four hour response times. Actual code changes for deploying new applications were known to take months. An upgrade to provide less than a dozen Linux boxes for additional server capacity – a project that was over a year old when I joined the BBC – was still being debated by Siemens when I left, eighteen months later.

The BBC’s infrastructure is shockingly outdated, having changed only by fractions over the past decade. Over-priced Sun Enterprise servers running Solaris and Apache provide the front-end layer. This is round-robin load balanced, there’s no management of session state, no load-based connection pool. The front-end servers proxy to the application layer, which is a handful of Solaris machines running Perl 5.6 – a language that was superseded with the release of Perl 5.8 over five and a half years ago. Part of the reason for this is the bizarre insistence that any native modules or anything that can call code of any kind must be removed from the standard libraries and replaced with a neutered version of that library by a Siemens engineer.

Yes, that’s right, Siemens forks Perl to remove features that their engineers don’t like.

This means that developers working at the BBC might not be able to code against documented features or interfaces because Siemens can, at their sole discretion, remove or change code in the standard libraries of the sole programming language in use. It also means that patches to the language, and widely available modules from CPAN may be several major versions out of date – if they are available at all. The recent deployment of Template Toolkit to the BBC servers is one such example – Siemens took years and objected to this constantly, and when finally they assented to provide the single most popular template language for Perl, they removed all code execution functions from the language…

There are some interesting comments on the post.

Second skin

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Giles Smith has been on the road again…

It’s a week since the new Lotus Europa S left me and I still bear the bruises. Specifically, I bear a bruise the size of a hubcap in the triceps area of my right arm – the legacy of my repeated attempts to get out of the car while retaining at least some degree of dignity.

It’s low, you see, the Europa S. Low and thin. You don’t so much climb into it as pull it on, the way you might pull on a pair of trousers or a sleeping bag. And once you’re in there, you are, technically, lying in the middle of the road, separated from the Tarmac by some leather upholstery, a sheet of metal and approximately two and a half centimetres of clear air.

The thing is to choose your location before exiting.

A crowded high street, for instance, may not be the best place to discover the full range of physical exertion involved. And if, at any point, both your palms are flat down on the pavement of that high street, with your legs still somewhere back in the car, as mine were in those tentative, trial stages, then you could end up wishing you had taken some private instruction first.

My advice: lean hard against the door-jamb. The catch will bruise your arm, but it will give you all the support you need. And take it one limb at a time. Another thing to master: a mock casual facial expression for use at the completion of the manoeuvre. It helps to mask the embarrassment and the pain.

And all because he wanted to drive “what is, in essence, a rocket-powered biscuit tin.”

That boy can write.