On The Technology Front
A couple of stories of interest that the BBC:
Microsoft profits down by a third
Microsoft has reported disappointing results for the April to June quarter, with profits down by almost a third.
Net profit for the period was $3.1bn (£1.9bn), down by 29% from the same period a year earlier. Revenue came in at $13.1bn, down 17% from a year ago.
The results were worse than analysts had been expecting.
The world’s largest software maker said it had been affected by weakness in the global personal computer (PC) and server markets.
Couldn’t happen to to a “nicer” company. If they spent as much on R&D as they do on lawyers, they might have some decent products that people wanted to buy, rather than the “cash cows” people are forced to buy when they want a name brand PC.
Of a good deal more interest is another report from TED: Wireless power system shown off.
This is on the work from WiTricity, which is actually fairly simple if you’ve had high school physics. It is essentially the same process that is used for radio or television broadcasting, except it uses extremely long wave lengths. It beats the hell out of looking for batteries in the middle of the night for a keyboard or a mouse.
16 comments
“Microsoft has reported disappointing results for the April to June quarter, with profits down by almost a third.”
Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!! Made my day. Now… If they could just loose another 125%, I’d be dancing in the streets. Or if The Dweeb get’s hit by a bus. Either would do. Both would be an epiphany! 😆
It’s hard to work up much in the way of sympathy for a company that has screwed so many while becoming so rich.
Wireless power… wow. Tesla vindicated?
.-= ´s last blog ..Friday Sunny Window Blogging =-.
Not totally, because what he wanted to do may have affected health, as he was working with higher frequencies. These guys are dealing in dekameters, not decimeters, very long wave with minimal effects, if any.
Well, IMHO, Tesla was a nut… a genius, perhaps, but a nut, definitely. Somewhere I have a biography by one of his hagiographers who eventually, far enough into the book, admits to Tesla’s nuthood alongside his techno-sainthood. From what I’ve read, even Mark Twain, a serious technophile, would have agreed with me on that.
His basic work was first rate, but he would have an “intuitive flash” and go off on a tangent.
You can do what he thought you could do, but you need to look at all the variable and test models. He would see something and then want to immediately create a full scale working device.
It he had spent more time in the lab, he would have discovered what these guys figured out, but he didn’t have the patience. As near as I can tell, he was, well, a nut when it came to some of his ideas.
You have to admit, he always failed in a big way, but that, too often, left people believing that the underlying concepts were wrong, rather than his usual failure on scale.
Steve: Isn’t that the definition of most geniuses? 😉
Speaking of Tesla, he said: “Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality”
(or, as Ernest Rutherford put it: “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”)
I’m reminded of a a prophetic statement Carl Sagan made some years ago:
“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
How did he know? That’s the scientific mind for you. Isn’t it amazing how much more demonstrably accurate scientifically reasoned prophecies are than their purely religious counterparts? 😉 😀
Thomas Henry Huxley once said:
“Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
Or, Albert Einstein:
“Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.”
Hmmm. I read too much. 😐
Hey! It seems Carl Sagan originally stated what I said above (not that it implies he and I have anything in common…) 😉
“Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?”
I have to admit, I prefer his version. 😉 😆
If Tesla had spent a bit more time with some basic equations and testing them, he would have found what he was looking for, before spending the time and money building something that couldn’t work.
Actually, the technology to make the system work, the accurate resonance tuning, wasn’t available to Tesla at the time, so he would have ended up like Babbage – a great idea that couldn’t be built.
Based on what I’ve read, you really need accurate frequency control for the system to have acceptable levels of efficiency, otherwise you end up with the situation of old AM radios, i.e. they would drift out of tune as they heated up.
I’m not so hard on Tesla. I’ve read his works… He was an inventor, an experimenter, not a theorist. I have a long-time friend who has a PhD in partical physics from Oxford from the early 60’s when they had to make all the instruments themselves, so he was forced to study engineering and other subjects, you couldn’t just grab a catalog like they do now. He say’s theoreticians today would be totally lost without people like Tesla. (And vice-versa).
I worked on radio-wave propagation for various projects. It’s a very hairy subject, even with several very good theoreticians and engineers, it was difficult.
I suspect that many scientists (and engineers) dislike Telsla mainly because he didn’t fit into the mold of either. I think he was very *intuitive*. I think he needed a bit more formal science, but from what I read, I think he found it difficult to get the education he needed. *shrug*
Pure Science can be more cutthroat than a knife fight. LOL
Oh, and let us NOT forget that the power companies and others were scred to death he was right! They went out of their way to put obstacles in fron tof Tesla and discredit him every chance they got. If, instead, they had actually helped him with resources and people, the World may indeed be a much better place now. But greed always trumps humanity and common good. Always.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” — Carl Sagan
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” — Neils Bohr
You need a better grounding in early 20th century corporations, Kryten. They didn’t interfere with Tesla, even if they didn’t help. If it had looked like it would work, they would have stolen the idea and made him sue them. Microsoft is a very conservative corporation and uses the tried and true methods of the early “robber barons” when it comes to new concepts. This is one of the reasons Jobs is such a fanatic on secrecy at Apple, he has been burned before.
Tesla was a jerk on a personal level, from all reports of those who worked with him, which made collaboration or cooperation nearly impossible. Consolidated Edison wasn’t exactly thrilled about the cost of stringing copper wire all over, it was a lot of work. My grandfather did some early electrification, and I’ve seen it in attics, including my families old farmhouse in New York – bare copper wire running through ceramic insulators hammered into roof beams could make a trip to the attic pretty exciting. Early light bulbs were replaced with a screwdriver, as there were terminal connections on the ceramic base. Knife switches were standard. Early “fuses” were nothing more that thinner copper wire running between two terminals in-line with the main. If you were lucky, the knife switch was on the proper side of the fuse link to make replacement safe.
I hate to say it, but most Scientists and Inventors are jerks, especially in the 19th & 20th centuries. 😉 It seemed to be a prerequisite. There are some exceptions of course. Many of mt Grandfathers peers considered him a know-it-all jerk, mainly because he was usually right. That’s the biggest sin of all in almost any field. He didn’t suffer fools at all well, and made sure they knew it. I learned well. 😆 😉
Yep! The good ol’ days before standards and safety regulations were invented to insure nothing was done without a lot of people, who had nothing to do with the actual work, made a lot of money.
“Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mindparalysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea… and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.”
I have no problem at all with people who don’t know, but nothing but scorn for those who refuse to learn. The amount of willful ignorance in any field is truly stunning.
One of my heroes in the husband of one of my Mother’s first cousins.
She wanted storage closets in her basement, which is perfectly reasonable and a good use of space as their house is on a hill and the basement is always dry. The problem was where she wanted the closet built and the doors she wanted on it.
He tried to change her mind, but she was adamant, so he built the closet and installed the doors to her specifications. The space is useless because the pipes in the basement prevent the doors from opening,as he knew they would.
She finally agreed that he was right, and suggested she would accept sliding doors, but he refused to change anything, and that closet has been unused for decades. He can be just as hard-headed as she is, and uses the closet to resolve other disputes over her projects.
Your example calls to mind Pascal’s Wager – if there is a G-d won’t S/He/It [or Sheit, if you will] be annoyed that that your belief is a matter of covering your bet. Nobody, even G-d, likes a smartass.
I have no problem at all with people who don’t know, but nothing but scorn for those who refuse to learn. The amount of willful ignorance in any field is truly stunning.
Very true and I’m the same. 🙂
Don’t get me wrong on Tesla, he certainly had (and created) his share of *issues*. I simply know that many who came after wouldn’t have made the breakthroughs they did without his groundbreaking. *shrug* Many highly regarded Scientists of the 20th century have stated that the #1 ingredient in any scientific endeavor is a good imagination. Tesla had that in spades. 🙂 He wasn’t much of a *people person*, and most certainly didn’t suffer fools at all well (his definition of *fool* was fairly broad, as is mine these days). 😉
I suppose I sympathize with him.
As for ‘Pascal’s Wager’… I suspect at least half the USA is guilty of that one, and possibly half the World. 😉 Certainly, all the ‘Sunday Christians’ (which we also have here, and I’ve seen in other countries) fall into that category. I just prefer to call them all hypocrites and leave it at that. 😉
It is occasionally difficult to separate imagination from obsession, and many don’t bother to try. Often there is a grain of truth, even in uninformed complaints, but if you aren’t willing to listen you’ll miss it. You’ll also miss the opportunity to patiently explain why someone is a totally ignorant fool, which can be amusing too.
I have spent more time than is good for my blood pressure in the company of “geniuses”, and I mean truly world-class, intelligent people. They are masters of the theory, but you also need the people who twist spanners for a living to tell why something may not work for very mundane reasons that you never considered, like it violates local fire or building codes.
Many great ideas have died in the hand-off from the researchers to the engineers, or the engineers to the technicians, as the limitations of the “real world”, the crappy existing infrastructure that things have to actually deal with to be viable.
Alas, the hypocrites are part of the “real world” in the US, and you have to deal with them to get anything done in Congress. They are obviously dumber than a brick, but they get to vote.