Come on, somebody that stupid is far from likely to be a terrorist. Whereas reporting them to the police would simply get you put on a file - why were you taking an interest in what they were doing?
As Sinclair noted, the reason that people then demanded change in Chicago meat packing wasn't the treatment of the workforce; it was their fear that they would die of eating infected meat. No such risk with iPhones, so there is no way of limiting the exploitation.
No, they have only sold millions of the Prius, creating a world lead in hybrid powertrains.The Volt is not nearly as good. Perhaps investment in things people benefit from is better than prestige pork barrel?
At the very least, your posting style suggests that you are more likely to succeed if you learn a little social psychology. As for the other stuff, you might just want to consider the basis on which Facebook, Apple and (perhaps strangely) the auto industry have built up their multibillion turnover. Because if you think it was done by engineers telling anyone who would listen that human factors were useless, and the people who did the usability testing and designed the user interfaces, and then created the demand for them, were from the trash can of higher education - you're wrong.
Water at atmospheric pressure just happens to form most of the major environment of life on earth, by volume and by surface area. The second is air, the third is rock. Neither have convenient melting or boiling points.
Little things like the melting point of water probably determine whether a planet supports life or not - and its enormous specific heat of both melting and boiling have a huge effect on climate, acting as a thermal store that tends to ensure that there is liquid water around for a long time after the temperature drops below the freezing point, and that pools of water do not disappear almost instantly when the sun shines on them. Celsius was right.
Magazine printing (not publishing) is an extremely competitive business in Europe and costs have been driven right down. There is lots of high speed web offset capacity available even for short runs. We also have other factors like advertisers who aren't run by dysfunctional billionaires who expect to dictate the science and politics of magazines in which they advertise.
The result is that you can still make good money running magazines. This is perhaps a factor in why Scientific American and National Geographic are now, in fact, British owned.
From the paper data days. Journalist visits IBM. As he ascends, the floors get more and more luxurious. On the ground floor are the helots in accounts keeping track of the piles of money. On the first floor are the punching and verifying rooms. On the second floor are the computer operators. On the third floor are the programmers. On the fourth floor are the analysts. On the fifth floor are the system architects. On the sixth floor are the computer scientists. On the 7th floor are the research fellows. On the 8th floor are the managers. On the 9th floor is the VP suite. On the 10th floor is the office of the chief executive. On the 11th floor is a penthouse suite. There is an enormous teak desk at which sits a man gazing into space. The journalist asks his guide "Who's he?". "He's the man that found a use for chads."
I would have modded this up, but I'd like to observe why this is a good idea. If you embed an NFC chip you can put in a link to a website where people can respond to the invitation. Geeks may like it, older and stuffy relatives won't be aware of it (QR codes could seriously worry or upset the technophobic generation.)
You could also have some things at the reception that are triggered off by sensing the NFC chip - again, entertain the younger generation without worrying the older one.
Or, you know - you could just have an absolutely straight wedding with no techno toys at all. A friend of ours got married recently and had a cartoonist to make sketches during the wedding and the reception. The resulting sketchbook was far more popular (and memorable) than the photos or the video.
Ah, well, there you give away a level of ignorance. World wide, more Blackberries are owned by end users than by corporates. The entry level models are cheap, and cheap to operate. Android phones offer more but the battery life is usually much worse and the data plans cost more. Virgin Mobile in the UK, who ruthlessly limit their phone choices to reduce the chance of being stuck with unpopular stock, sell the 9810 as one of their flagship models. BB's new push with NFC is into the Turkish market - a developing country with 65 million mobile phone users and a lot to play for.
To succeed in this area, they need marketing.
I find it interesting that a number of people responding to my post simply don't understand why marketing is so important. I ask one question: How did Apple survive when it was in the doldrums and the products were pretty crap? Users were made to believe that there was a plan, and made to feel that in some way they had bought into a company that was going places. That was marketing, pure and simple.
That is just tired, neocon Randian fluff. And there are still some economists and consultants who will tell you so. In a free market, the ultimate objective of many intelligent company managements is to identify a profitable niche and fill it.
This is because any market with a complete monopoly means that customers will try to get out of that market altogether. Dell does not really want to be the only PC maker, because then anybody who really hates them will try and find an alternative to PCs, and that alternative may become the new norm. End customers actually need choice, because the perception of competition in the market generates buzz. The mere fact of competition brings the segment to the attention of people who would otherwise not hear of it. It increases the size of the market and enables companies to grow without having to do so at the expense of the competition.
Also, of course, there is no such thing as a "company" in terms of objective; there are people. Even the best CEO (who doesn't know he is going to die or retire before long) is aware that without competition he doesn't have a plan B if things go wrong, and his salary is likely to be lower than it would be if the shareholders think he might jump ship.
Apple indeed nearly went under, not just because of Jobs but because they were stuck on an obsolete platform with its legacy ties to the 68K architecture. Apple then went through a lot of pain while making the transition to BSD.
BB is currently stuck on a legacy platform with, I suspect, vast cruft to support. They are transitioning to a new platform, based on QNX Neutrino, which is potentially a much better phone/tablet OS than either iOS or Android. In effect, they need what Apple got; a genius marketing director who was ruthless about ensuring that products met the needs of the marketing department, coupled with a platform that was good enough to support what he wanted to do. They have the platform. They need a Jobs.
The big change in RIM is that they have been run by two people who really did not understand the need for marketing. Even when watching the Reality Distortion Factor at work, they didn't understand it. RIM's problem has been that they acquired consumer market share almost by accident and didn't cover it with love, hugs and kisses. They need marketing.
How many people understand the difference between pull and push email and how it affects them in the pocket? How many developers understand why Neutrino has advantages over iOS?
A serious marketing department would have launched the Playbook by giving them away to every Android developer who cared to ask for one. They would have spent money in product placement, developed a Curve phone optimised to work with the Playbook, and sold them as a single product so that people "got" the Bridge from day 1. Instead, they launched at far too high a price with a corporate advertisement that nobody understood. People saw the lack of native email as a downside, not seeing that with a BB phone you had one mobile connection that worked both devices. It was a classical launch by engineers who assumed that everybody was as clever as they were.
However, unlike HP, the tablet is pretty good, and there is still market share to lose. Their best bet is to spend marketing money outside the US in the emergent markets and Europe, since they cannot compete with Apple.
We had a German family in the same hotel. The first night they were outside looking at the stars and someone said "There you are, we have better stars than you do in Germany". The husband took it quite seriously and said "You are right, we live in the Ruhr and you can never see stars clearly through the haze".
I don't normally respond to ACs - but you are right. At out last house the Council wanted to install a street light outside - at a cost of several thousand pounds. We demanded that they fit a reflective hood to keep the light away from our house, as I like to be able to see stars. They fussed a lot over a £10 add-on to an expensive streetlight which actually put more light where it was wanted.
We got it. But why the argument was necessary in the first place I cannot imagine.
A Russian radiothermal generator is a significant plot device in the Russian film How I ended this summer, (Russian title omitted due to lameness) which is a film all geeks should be required to see.
Fusion is probably like this: James Watt thinks of the condenser and sees a possible way to make a more efficient atmospheric engine. An imaginary journalist hears about it and predicts horseless carriages on the roads in 20 years. By the time the metallurgy, the metal forming, and the technology has sorted itself out to the level at which a steam road vehicle is actually practical, it is obsolete because spark ignition and compression ignition oil engines have been invented, followed by the gas turbine.
I went to school in the 1960s. At the time, the Government was funding teaching of basic nuclear chemistry and physics in schools in the belief that there would be a need for a large supply of nuclear engineers. Fusion was thought to be about 20 years away.
The last I saw, a practical fusion reactor was estimated to be between 50 and 70 years away.
The reason is dirt simple. In the 60s, people didn't have a clue about the problems that needed to be solved. Because high energy plasmas and superconducting magnets didn't exist, there was no way of knowing how difficult confinement was going to be.
It is like Arthur C Clarke predicting flying cities in the 1950s - the technology gap was so huge, people didn't see how unbridgeable it was.
I am quite prepared to believe that practical fusion power is simply not achievable, because at the moment every single step between "think of fusion power" and "profit" is actually a series of question marks.
I got carried away. It is true that the protests at the A46 Solsbury Hill added to the cost of the road, but to attribute it to a pair of journalists, no matter how influential, is ridiculous and I apologise. There was a general anti-road feeling in the early 90s, and they just tapped into the public mood. Please put it down to a severe attack of sciatica. I will now stop posting until it returns to tolerable levels.
"The Dimblebys are behind this campaign. They opposed it at a public inquiry and have refused to accept the result . . . The Mooneys telling us what to do and what's good for us is hardly pleasing this community.'
I would write more (I was around at the time and had to use that road a lot, so it was a matter of considerable interest) but the laws of libel in the UK are such that I can only write "see what's in the public domain".
Yup. They cut it to save £6000 of loss, and then lost £24000 of income on the main line because the accountants were too stupid to understand that just about every single passenger was going on to London. Now, in 2012, that would be a very profitable line through expensive Hertfordshire villages.
British accountants frequently combine arrogance with ignorance; their inability to understand how businesses really work has been one of the reasons for failure of UK PLC.
The Poles are increasingly doing the middle class jobs. The Russians...the oligarchs will loan the money to the Government so that the Government won't extradite them to Russia when Putin needs a rouble or two.
The T34, which was arguably the war-winning weapon for the Russians in its various incarnations, used a BMW-designed advanced light Diesel engine. You could say that BMW was on the Russian team.
I don't recommend this idea at all, but stomach acid is only dilute hydrochloric. There are sealed USB sticks with gold plated copper contacts that would have no problems with it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, somebody that stupid is far from likely to be a terrorist. Whereas reporting them to the police would simply get you put on a file - why were you taking an interest in what they were doing?
As Sinclair noted, the reason that people then demanded change in Chicago meat packing wasn't the treatment of the workforce; it was their fear that they would die of eating infected meat. No such risk with iPhones, so there is no way of limiting the exploitation.
They can hide upside-down in a bowl of custard (the French will not understand this.)
No, they have only sold millions of the Prius, creating a world lead in hybrid powertrains.The Volt is not nearly as good. Perhaps investment in things people benefit from is better than prestige pork barrel?
At the very least, your posting style suggests that you are more likely to succeed if you learn a little social psychology. As for the other stuff, you might just want to consider the basis on which Facebook, Apple and (perhaps strangely) the auto industry have built up their multibillion turnover. Because if you think it was done by engineers telling anyone who would listen that human factors were useless, and the people who did the usability testing and designed the user interfaces, and then created the demand for them, were from the trash can of higher education - you're wrong.
I don't know about you, but my most sensitive GPS (of several) gets in in-building resolution of about 12 metres.
Little things like the melting point of water probably determine whether a planet supports life or not - and its enormous specific heat of both melting and boiling have a huge effect on climate, acting as a thermal store that tends to ensure that there is liquid water around for a long time after the temperature drops below the freezing point, and that pools of water do not disappear almost instantly when the sun shines on them. Celsius was right.
The result is that you can still make good money running magazines. This is perhaps a factor in why Scientific American and National Geographic are now, in fact, British owned.
From the paper data days. Journalist visits IBM. As he ascends, the floors get more and more luxurious. On the ground floor are the helots in accounts keeping track of the piles of money. On the first floor are the punching and verifying rooms. On the second floor are the computer operators. On the third floor are the programmers. On the fourth floor are the analysts. On the fifth floor are the system architects. On the sixth floor are the computer scientists. On the 7th floor are the research fellows. On the 8th floor are the managers. On the 9th floor is the VP suite. On the 10th floor is the office of the chief executive. On the 11th floor is a penthouse suite. There is an enormous teak desk at which sits a man gazing into space. The journalist asks his guide "Who's he?". "He's the man that found a use for chads."
You could also have some things at the reception that are triggered off by sensing the NFC chip - again, entertain the younger generation without worrying the older one.
Or, you know - you could just have an absolutely straight wedding with no techno toys at all. A friend of ours got married recently and had a cartoonist to make sketches during the wedding and the reception. The resulting sketchbook was far more popular (and memorable) than the photos or the video.
To succeed in this area, they need marketing.
I find it interesting that a number of people responding to my post simply don't understand why marketing is so important. I ask one question: How did Apple survive when it was in the doldrums and the products were pretty crap? Users were made to believe that there was a plan, and made to feel that in some way they had bought into a company that was going places. That was marketing, pure and simple.
This is because any market with a complete monopoly means that customers will try to get out of that market altogether. Dell does not really want to be the only PC maker, because then anybody who really hates them will try and find an alternative to PCs, and that alternative may become the new norm. End customers actually need choice, because the perception of competition in the market generates buzz. The mere fact of competition brings the segment to the attention of people who would otherwise not hear of it. It increases the size of the market and enables companies to grow without having to do so at the expense of the competition.
Also, of course, there is no such thing as a "company" in terms of objective; there are people. Even the best CEO (who doesn't know he is going to die or retire before long) is aware that without competition he doesn't have a plan B if things go wrong, and his salary is likely to be lower than it would be if the shareholders think he might jump ship.
BB is currently stuck on a legacy platform with, I suspect, vast cruft to support. They are transitioning to a new platform, based on QNX Neutrino, which is potentially a much better phone/tablet OS than either iOS or Android. In effect, they need what Apple got; a genius marketing director who was ruthless about ensuring that products met the needs of the marketing department, coupled with a platform that was good enough to support what he wanted to do. They have the platform. They need a Jobs.
How many people understand the difference between pull and push email and how it affects them in the pocket? How many developers understand why Neutrino has advantages over iOS?
A serious marketing department would have launched the Playbook by giving them away to every Android developer who cared to ask for one. They would have spent money in product placement, developed a Curve phone optimised to work with the Playbook, and sold them as a single product so that people "got" the Bridge from day 1. Instead, they launched at far too high a price with a corporate advertisement that nobody understood. People saw the lack of native email as a downside, not seeing that with a BB phone you had one mobile connection that worked both devices. It was a classical launch by engineers who assumed that everybody was as clever as they were.
However, unlike HP, the tablet is pretty good, and there is still market share to lose. Their best bet is to spend marketing money outside the US in the emergent markets and Europe, since they cannot compete with Apple.
I imagine this has changed nowadays.
We got it. But why the argument was necessary in the first place I cannot imagine.
A Russian radiothermal generator is a significant plot device in the Russian film How I ended this summer, (Russian title omitted due to lameness) which is a film all geeks should be required to see.
Fusion is probably like this: James Watt thinks of the condenser and sees a possible way to make a more efficient atmospheric engine. An imaginary journalist hears about it and predicts horseless carriages on the roads in 20 years. By the time the metallurgy, the metal forming, and the technology has sorted itself out to the level at which a steam road vehicle is actually practical, it is obsolete because spark ignition and compression ignition oil engines have been invented, followed by the gas turbine.
The last I saw, a practical fusion reactor was estimated to be between 50 and 70 years away.
The reason is dirt simple. In the 60s, people didn't have a clue about the problems that needed to be solved. Because high energy plasmas and superconducting magnets didn't exist, there was no way of knowing how difficult confinement was going to be.
It is like Arthur C Clarke predicting flying cities in the 1950s - the technology gap was so huge, people didn't see how unbridgeable it was.
I am quite prepared to believe that practical fusion power is simply not achievable, because at the moment every single step between "think of fusion power" and "profit" is actually a series of question marks.
I got carried away. It is true that the protests at the A46 Solsbury Hill added to the cost of the road, but to attribute it to a pair of journalists, no matter how influential, is ridiculous and I apologise. There was a general anti-road feeling in the early 90s, and they just tapped into the public mood. Please put it down to a severe attack of sciatica. I will now stop posting until it returns to tolerable levels.
I would write more (I was around at the time and had to use that road a lot, so it was a matter of considerable interest) but the laws of libel in the UK are such that I can only write "see what's in the public domain".
British accountants frequently combine arrogance with ignorance; their inability to understand how businesses really work has been one of the reasons for failure of UK PLC.
The Poles are increasingly doing the middle class jobs. The Russians...the oligarchs will loan the money to the Government so that the Government won't extradite them to Russia when Putin needs a rouble or two.
The T34, which was arguably the war-winning weapon for the Russians in its various incarnations, used a BMW-designed advanced light Diesel engine. You could say that BMW was on the Russian team.
I don't recommend this idea at all, but stomach acid is only dilute hydrochloric. There are sealed USB sticks with gold plated copper contacts that would have no problems with it at all.