If you’re in a rush here’s the quick answer: If life was pre-determined we’d be able to forecast the weather perfectly, too.

Recently I’ve spent quite some time on the topic of artificial intelligence and the fascinating question of what is consciousness. What would it entail to build a man-made self-conscious system? Along came the question of predeterminism of a system and predeterminism of life. Small things.

I’m a CPU architect by profession and have spent many waking hours of my life creating deterministic simulation environments to verify our complex micro-processors. This sounds easy but is actually really hard. It also means that you need to limit yourself to certain design styles that yield deterministic and therefore perfectly reproducible results. A good example of things that can destroy determinism are asynchronous events in a real system, such as interrupts (i.e. keyboard key strokes) that can invoke interrupt routines and disrupt the expected instruction stream. This particular instance is a solvable problem, but in general asynchronous events in non-linear systems are the culprit.

In complex systems with non-linear chaotic behavior, such as weather systems, we can make statistical assertions about their general behavior. But when it comes to determining exactly how the system is going to behave close to a points of instability not even infinite precision in the description of the current condition can predict the exact outcome. We can only make statistical statements about the outcome. This property of chaotic systems prevents us from predicting all asynchronous events that might affect our lives in one way or another. These complex and at times unpredictable behaviors apply as much to weather systems as they apply to outbreaks of diseases that might affect certain individuals. Think of a viral infection causing fever and seizures in humans, heavily affecting their thinking process. Physical diseases might even permanently alter brain structures and synaptic connections. All of which would have the potential to change an individuals behaviour/mood/decision making process in the future. Please note that I’m talking about conscious decision making of the individual. Taken to the extreme sicknesses can cause personality changes that will alter a persons decision outcome. I.e. as a result of such a personality change someone decides to persue a different professional career, with far reaching consequences for his life in the long term (economic outlook, location of job, consumed literature, etc.)

So while for long periods of times individuals live in the linearly predictable parts of the world and causing behaviors that appear to be largely predictable (i.e. I get on the train every morning to get to work and then attend a recurring meeting), these asynchronous events can wreak havoc on long term outcomes of decisions affecting an individuals life.

Therefore predeterminism isn’t a property of human life or even biological life as a whole. But it’s largely predictable enough to exploit long times of relative stability in ways to learn and predict and benefit from these behaviors – for yourself and 3rd parties.

So where does that leave machines? That’s a topic for another post…

The original Kindle Fire is one of those devices that keeps amazing me. Now after some three years with it, it’s still going strong as my son’s youtube movie platform, streaming through my phone wifi hotspot in the car. This device has been dropped, drowned, overheated, deep cycled and whatever else you can throw at a consumer device. But it has never failed us. You plug it in to charge and it just does what it was meant to do. As a first generation product it was amazingly open and I never bothered to set it up as a true Amazon device. I just used it as a cheap Android platform. And it still works well. Compared against the other shiny offerings in that space of course its glory has faded, but that doesn’t take away from it’s usability. I’m still a happy customer, not something I can say about the Asus Nexus 7 (which died after four months). I also own an original iPad 1, an iPad Air, an iPad mini, a Galaxy TAB and a MacBook Air 11″. The Fire has aged well.

… nearly 11% of the 3.4 million passwords are  1234  !!!

Statistically, one third of all codes can be guessed by trying just 61 distinct combinations!

 Read more here:

During my last trip to India I was challenged to make the buying decision for a cell phone for my mother in law. She wanted a Samsung phone, so I felt well equipped to make that decision for her. Boy, was I unprepared for what awaited me at the local store: instead of one or two phones per brand and carrier in the US, the phones are not distributed by the cell carriers – there are multiple of tens of different phones. They are sold as a piece of hardware by any local electronics store. You then buy your SIM card from you preferred network provider and stick it into the phone. When I arrived at the store I was overwhelmed by the 20+ choices of Samsung branded phones alone that were all staring at me. Well, I knew I wanted an Android device (that dropped three phones from the list), preferably 2.3 (another 10 or so gone), a fast A9 processor and a good display. We were down to 5 phones, when distinguishing by technical features became impossible by the information on their respective stickers. Talk about confusing! We had to get the boxes and compare line item by line item to narrow down the choice further. Dumbing me down to a happy American consumer has almost worked, as I was longing for less choices. Can someone just decide on my behalf, tell me what I want and make me feel good about it?

After another ten minutes of studying features on the phone boxes we finally zeroed in on a model that had all the features and a TFT display, not the AMOLED display of the top of the line phone that is also sold in the US. Backing off from the top of the line phone saved us some serious bucks, compromising little. The functionality and versatility of the Android 2.3 device is just plain awesome!

Needless to say that this particular model is not marketed in the US.

Who would have thought? After only 45 days after having introduced its own tablet offering HP announced yesterday to abandon the hardware business for tablets. That’s a new record in burning money!
At the same time HP has announced plans to divest from all PC Hardware business as well – a shocking, yet not fully surprising move. PCs have become commodities and selling them these days is an uphill battle with razor thin margins.
So they’re fleeing to higher grounds, called services and underlined their decision with a 10 billion acquisition in that area the same day.
The revolution is under way – first victim announced: HP