Posts by Eddie Edwards

What shape were you expecting?

The ogive - an S-shaped curve which starts to trail downwards, gets faster to halfway, then slows down and tails off so it's tangential to the axis when it hits it - is the expected un-adoption curve.

It comes from the integral of the normal distribution, so if people are de-adopting according to that (which is completely expected) then the ogive is what you'd get. We are now in the "late de-adopters" phase since we've passed the maximum de-adoption rate and the rate is now slowing, as we pass the peak and reach the "long tail" of the normal distribution.

So the stats are obeying expectation perfectly. What shape were you expecting? A comedy nosedive to negative several billion, like what one sees in one-frame cartoons? :p Ain't gonna happen with a variable that can't go negative!

This is the curve of a dying format. Not actually being mortal, there is no binary decision point where the format is now "dead" versus being "alive". The long tail of de-adoption could go on for 50 years, and in fact given this curve you can calculate how long that is for any definition of "dead" you wish to select (e.g. 10,000 global purchases per year).

Sorry to bring statistics to the table on an article about statistics, but hey, slow day at work.

Welcome back to the dark ages

"If it was worldwide in extent that would strongly suggest that global warming may just be something that happens from time to time, not something caused by miniscule concentrations of CO2 (the atmosphere is 0.04 per cent CO2 right now; this figure might climb to 0.07 per cent in the medium term)."

Reminds me of all the arsenic poisoning cases that were thrown out when the jury heard that new peer-reviewed evidence strongly suggested that death was just something that happens from time to time, not something caused by miniscule concentrations of arsenic.

Because, obviously, the fact that things happen from time to time means that you can rule out any and all causal models.

Welcome back to the dark ages.

Matrix Revolutions

Matrix Revolutions is surely one of the worst films ever made.

Uh oh

I was just on crowdfunder, and they use PayPal to take the money, and to give it to the venture. Since none of those ventures have product ready to ship, presumably this is also against PayPal's T&Cs?

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/pg/how-crowdfunder-works-4

*cough* Sky?

"The net has exploded the myth that we'll pay for something even if we don't use it. ... The bundle has been blown apart. We've entered the pay-as-you-go era of media consumption."

This must be why Sky is doing so badly, with its bundle-based menu of chunks you have to buy in order to see one program you like. Yup, no one is using Sky any more. Poor old Murdoch. His mythical business with profits of £1bn from 10m households has been exploded by the internet.

Easily impressed

"The app will also see characters come to life in 3D, jumping out the page to wow those who are easily impressed."

Comic in attempt to appeal to its target demographic shock.

You guys are right

If knocking down patents was as easy as generalizing them, thinking of something similar, and then shouting "prior art", there would be a lot fewer patents in the world.

And if invention was as easy as taking past similar ideas and blowing magic fairy dust on them, there would be a lot more innovation.

I doubt this game owes anything to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It takes a long time to make a game, and the plot elements of this would have been fleshed out way before DX:HR was released. The games industry, sadly, cannot turn on a dime.

Perhaps more accurate to say it owes a lot to Deus Ex, which in turn owes a lot to System Shock, which in turn, yada yada yada ...

Besides the hypobole (this thinking is proving fatal) and the downright bizarre (resources as "vectors" - whatever that means), the thrust of this article is basically that we don't have to worry about resources running out because, hey, we can invent things.

Do I really have to explain why that's a stupid position? Especially when the article does tacitly accept that human ingenuity has limits.

History is history; stories about whale blubber being displaced are all very interesting, but this liberal arts approach to science policy is as dumb as they come. Yes, you can look at history, you can say "people acted like this back then", and you can invite us to assume that therefore history is merely repeating itself now, and is bound to repeat itself in this way, forever. But it doesn't prove anything, because the invariants in history are human behaviour, not the viability of various technologies. The only human behaviour outlined here is that people worry and start to make plans when prediction indicates problems ahead. Orlowski seems to be advocating a more, shall we say, ostrich-style approach to governance.

And don't even get me started on why Citigroup may have an interest in affecting the commodity prices by releasing a report like this. Orlowski doesn't trust the University of East Anglia, but he trusts Citigroup? Sheesh.

Still, not many people are talented enough to make confirmation bias into a successful career path.

Not this old chestnut again

Downloading is not theft, Andrew. Go read the Theft Act. He may well be a Freetard, but saying that downloading is not theft merely indicates that he knows how theft is defined in English law.

Heh

Any mention of Orlowski in there?

Good grief

I can't quite get my head around this. That trollish takedown notice actually was from the Serious Organised Crime Agency? What the hell? Seriously, what the hell?

So musicians can't have .music domains? Interesting concept.

It might well be "cheaper than you might think" but their quote-based pricing sure gives the impression of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Any hints for people who are not curious enough to submit a fake quote request?

VCs get screwed by founder, instead of the other way around?

VCs get screwed by founder, instead of the other way around? Now that's news! Zuckerberg just went up in my estimation.

EULAs are enforceable now, are they?

I don't see any reason I can't write a book and distribute it in iBook format on any channel I please. I'm not going to read the EULA, and when I click OK it's so I can run the software, not because I agree to any conditions which I haven't read anyway.

If Apple choose to give away iBooks Author that's up to them, but people own content they make, owing to the Berne Convention etc., and a click-through EULA on some free software is not going to trump those long-standing legal principles in any sane court of law.

IMHO, IANAL, and so on and so forth.

Twitter should remove these tweets & photos, although it wouldn't be the first time Jordan's snickers have been pulled down. #badamching

"Presumably porn makers would leap at the chance to come up with shooting styles that enhance the illusion that the user is making love to an actual human"

Google "POV" ...

Nice

So if you layer this on top of a low-temperature superconductor then you can dispense with all that liquid nitrogen ... cool. I look forward to Wipeout Scalextric in the near future!

Typical men

Typical men :) Instead of saying "we don't know what the G-spot is" they say "the G-spot does not exist". From the Richard Dawkins school of science.

There's definitely *something* there, according to reported subjective experience during my informal scientific research on the subject. Even if it's just a hallucination, it's still a real phenomenon.