Congratulations. You just did an epic failure at understanding of evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. And you think that every culture is like the most redneck bits of the US.
This "evolved to focus on a trade" bit. Do tell us more. In particular, I'd love to see your lecture to an audience of women fighter pilots.
The reason women haven't filled professional jobs is because knuckle draggers like you have made darn sure that they didn't get the chance, since that way the competition was reduced.
And I ran out of mod points. Yes. I once worked with a guy, a brilliant EE, who had worked at Tektronix, Philips and universities doing research. None of the major projects he had been involved with had ever resulted in a finished product, but the ideas and concepts he developed were all over the place. This is why bean counters are the last people to let near an engineering department.
No, maybe the US should drop its system of corporate governance.
Americans seem to have forgotten that they had a war to get rid of a king because monarchic government is arbitrary, over-centralised and attracts sycophants. So they have corporations, many bigger than medieval kingdoms, which are run dysfunctionally by a monarchical system of government.
The pattern isn't that Fiorina, Apotheker, Bartz and so on are incompetent. It is that the system amplifies the errors and prejudices of single individuals. The special training for the job is basically to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, you are superhuman. A normal person with average humility would perceive that the job is impossible. Once someone is sufficiently deluded to believe that they are capable of being a CEO, who knows what demons lie in their personality?
Jobs and Ellison on their own prove nothing; it is possible that both would have failed in a different environment (Jobs could have been the worst CEO of HP or Microsoft ever, but we have no way of knowing.)
I thought printer makers were the last people in the world to think that USL outvolumes A4.
Hint: the population of the EU considerably outnumbers the population of the US, and most of the world's commercial printers are now designed around ISO sizes, whether sheet or web. As for the printer makers, you could regard it as a subtle insult: Europeans are intelligent enough to change the default setting to A4, Americans are considered insufficiently intelligent to change from A4 to USL. (The real reason is that a change to a default of A4 would reduce the reported print speed and cartridge life.)
People without children pay towards the public education system. I live in an area which has had no recorded crime in two years, but I pay for the police. As the great Harvard jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, taxes pay for civilisation.
I know it isn't a joke if you have to explain it, but it was partly a joke. The BBC with its mission to educate and to inform preceded television. However, I was serious in contrasting the BBC with commercial broadcasting.
To reduce the longwindedness of my posts I removed some remarks about the Murdoch family and their hatred of the BBC. I will restore them in summary. That the Murdochs hate the BBC is sufficient justification for its existence.
Rachel, I would like to give you a mod point, but I'd like to make a philosophical point if I may, and I can't do both.
Philo T Farnsworth invented US television, which is that commercial stuff in which the viewers are the sweetcorn, the advertisers are the buyers, and the TV company is the farmer. John Logie Baird invented British television in which the taxpayer is the customer, pays directly for the product, and elects politicians to keep an eye on things. That's quite different, as well as being a whole lot better.
Hurd's misdemeanours seem to have been very minor. Outsiders might speculate that he trod on toes and was forced out. His successor has managed to wipe billions off the share price and royally piss off the distributors way ahead of any spin off, which might be seen as very much worse.
Now Oracle has acquired a man who knows HP and probably would like nothing better than to move into the president's office after the cheap Oracle takeover and start firing some people. It is a terrible way to run business, but it makes a lot of sense.
What do you expect? How on Earth did HP come to appoint a CEO from a software-only company that has probably never seen an end user customer in his life? It isn't as if Ford appointed a CEO from Boeing; it is as if they appointed a CEO from a fleet leasing company. The result; a decision announced in haste that was bound to deprecate HP as a brand. Apotheker seems to have forgotten - or did not know - that today's phone buyer may be tomorrow's CIO.
Yes, the could have sold the tablets at a small loss. And, since the Pre 2 phone sells happily in its unlocked state at around $200 in the UK, they could have sold off the Pre 3 for maybe a little more. Legally in the EU they must support the things, so they might as well do it properly. But no...
I happen to like phones with portrait format and keyboards. Some people do. I'm now having to look at the BB Torch 9810 for a next phone. It doesn't look to be as good or as convenient as the Pre 3. OK the screen is smaller that an iPhone's, the processor is slower than on a Samsung. But the actual operation as a phone/messaging device is that much nicer than either. Some people prefer, say, the Prius to an Audi or a BMW. HP just never bothered to find its market and then market to it. Yet if there was a company that could have taken on RIM, it was HP.
Since an oil company is 100% likely to be de facto part of the US Government, any level of support for the Greens will be less than that. Even Brezhnev never got more than about 99.8% of the vote.
...mind you, I really wish the Greens were sensible. I am myself an annoyingly smug environmentalist, but as someone with a scientific and engineering education who has dabbled on the fringes of politics, whenever they open their mouths I cringe.
No. There is a reason why Python is still a very minority language and Javascript (ECMAScript to be exact) is not. Javascript is good enough. For the great majority, Python is a PITA. Practicality trumps perfectionism, every single time.
Even if only 10% of the zombie touchpads in the field continue to run webOS, the loyal user base will continue to develop for it. Perhaps they are wrong or misguided...but people still buy Morgan cars and build wooden sailboats. And I, wierdo that I am, Bluetooth tether a Pre to an Android tablet and can run the same HTML5 on both.
A sensible idea. The webOS UI and logical menu system would improve Android a lot (I am a sad loser, I have both...) But when did a sensible, logical idea ever get any traction at all in the mirror universe of American industry?
I am going to intervene to make an obvious point. You are wrong. Laws against murder and manslaughter are quite recent. Before that you had blood feuds and honor killings. Lawyers are the reason that legitimate companies settle disputes in court while the mob and drug dealers use guns. They are why most people in the developed world (and a majority of Americans) don't need to know how to kill intruders. In many countries, like Apartheid South Africa, lawyers are often heroes in defence of civil rights.
The problem in the US is bad laws.
I am not a lawyer, I don't even pretend to be on the Internet, but I think it is significant that my family includes computer scientists, engineers and lawyers. We all seek to create order out of chaos.
I think the networks were, quite simply, frightened of things like the N900 because what they want is total control, and something that you can get root access to prevents that.
Nokia's problem was, I think, simply that it could not succeed in the US market with an open platform. Google is a US company and the dynamics for Android were different once Motorola adopted it. Because users around the world still look to the US for validation, Nokia felt that they had to have a serious presence in the US market and that meant being beholden to a US company.
As it is, their share price has truly tanked, their institutional investors must be distraught, and before long Microsoft will buy them out of spare change. My own view, for what little it is worth, is that they would have done better to walk completely away from the US market. But then the directors wouldn't have been so rewarded...
Asus haven't been spending much on advertising, so the Transformer doesn't get mentioned in reviews. It's quite entertaining reading a review of a tablet which mentions the Xoom, Samsung's products and the like, and omits the one which sells half a million a month.
As for user innovation, localStorage and webSQL make it possible to develop small Android applications in AJAX which can then be centrally deployed by IT and which will also work on PCs running Chrome.
Conclusion: Shakespeare said it best about the article:
It is a tale spoken by an idiot, signifying nothing.
You did say "average American". The mere fact that Americans put up with their somewhat backwards mobile phone system instead of marching in Washington demanding change they can believe in shows that the average is not particularly knowledgeable.
Kenyans...when the UK went decimal currency with much moaning and groaning, a retired District Inspector explained how Kenya went metric. The DIs went down the market early with new sets of weights and measures, conversion charts and handouts. They sat down with the market traders and explained the new system, that it was simpler than the old one, and how it worked. The traders converted their prices. By lunchtime the market was running on metric.
An education system that prioritises arithmetic and language skills, and a country where education is seen as opening avenues, can have a lot going for it.
Samsung is relatively naive and comes from a country where people innovate rather than litigate. It was possible to ambush them. Apple ambushing HP would result in their being crushed by an elephant.
If Redmond and all its outstantions were nuked from orbit tomorrow, people would rapidly reverse engineer the licensing and continue to use and deploy the products while transitioning to replacements. There would be hardly any downside. IBM itself, on the other hand, along with Oracle and HP, provide massive support operations to critical systems which would fall over.
Visa/Mastercard > Exxon >= {Oracle|IBM|HP} > Microsoft > Apple.
Before GPS, I had to work with a salesman who would only travel on motorways because he was a crappy map reader (he once sent us the wrong way in Germany because, and I am not lying, he had the map upside down and forgot the Sun rises in the East).
Once in Switzerland he seriously proposed a route that was 3 sides of a square because the fourth side was the (very) scenic route. I overruled him and took the fourth side, while he complained for the next hour and a half that we would be "late", right till we got to the airport nearly two hours early.
GPS was made for people like him, though I wonder if he has looked for one with an "avoid mountain passes" option.
So it is too expensive and dangerous to transport fuel, but there is no risk of a coal mine or a solar array being the target of the Taliban? Not to mention the cables, the substations and the actual laser bases.
This thing just smells of trolling for a research grant.
And, by the way, even with the proper definition of order of magnitude (fifth root of 100, not 10 - Wikipedia is wrong here because the term was invented for astronomy) coal and sunshine are not orders of magnitude cheaper than avgas, unless you factor in those transport and protection costs. Which I suspect will prove to be identical.
My father is 88. Last year I noticed his Ubuntu desktop had changed and I asked how. It had invited him to update to the next LTS release, he had followed the instructions. He is a retired lawyer, not a programmer.
And a high risk strategy. Currently Apple is doing everything it can to inflate its share price in the short term while creating enemies for the long term. An EU design registration must be on features that are not function-related. If it can be shown that a design feature is in fact the result of an in optimisation, or required for compatibility with a pre-existing requirement, it can be invalidated.
For instance, suppose I register a box with round corners. Now you show that the real reason for round corners is so that the box, designed to go in a pocket, will not put too much stress on the pocket material. It is a human factors improvement; it should not be usable as a design copyright.
I'm sure that Samsung will be actively pursuing any way of showing that Apple's tablet design follows naturally from engineering factors for a portable computer. Meanwhile, Apple had better hope its new manufacturing partners don't start to worry about which of their products it might go after.
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This "evolved to focus on a trade" bit. Do tell us more. In particular, I'd love to see your lecture to an audience of women fighter pilots.
The reason women haven't filled professional jobs is because knuckle draggers like you have made darn sure that they didn't get the chance, since that way the competition was reduced.
And I ran out of mod points. Yes. I once worked with a guy, a brilliant EE, who had worked at Tektronix, Philips and universities doing research. None of the major projects he had been involved with had ever resulted in a finished product, but the ideas and concepts he developed were all over the place. This is why bean counters are the last people to let near an engineering department.
Americans seem to have forgotten that they had a war to get rid of a king because monarchic government is arbitrary, over-centralised and attracts sycophants. So they have corporations, many bigger than medieval kingdoms, which are run dysfunctionally by a monarchical system of government.
The pattern isn't that Fiorina, Apotheker, Bartz and so on are incompetent. It is that the system amplifies the errors and prejudices of single individuals. The special training for the job is basically to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, you are superhuman. A normal person with average humility would perceive that the job is impossible. Once someone is sufficiently deluded to believe that they are capable of being a CEO, who knows what demons lie in their personality?
Jobs and Ellison on their own prove nothing; it is possible that both would have failed in a different environment (Jobs could have been the worst CEO of HP or Microsoft ever, but we have no way of knowing.)
Hint: the population of the EU considerably outnumbers the population of the US, and most of the world's commercial printers are now designed around ISO sizes, whether sheet or web. As for the printer makers, you could regard it as a subtle insult: Europeans are intelligent enough to change the default setting to A4, Americans are considered insufficiently intelligent to change from A4 to USL. (The real reason is that a change to a default of A4 would reduce the reported print speed and cartridge life.)
People without children pay towards the public education system. I live in an area which has had no recorded crime in two years, but I pay for the police. As the great Harvard jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, taxes pay for civilisation.
To reduce the longwindedness of my posts I removed some remarks about the Murdoch family and their hatred of the BBC. I will restore them in summary. That the Murdochs hate the BBC is sufficient justification for its existence.
Philo T Farnsworth invented US television, which is that commercial stuff in which the viewers are the sweetcorn, the advertisers are the buyers, and the TV company is the farmer. John Logie Baird invented British television in which the taxpayer is the customer, pays directly for the product, and elects politicians to keep an eye on things. That's quite different, as well as being a whole lot better.
Now Oracle has acquired a man who knows HP and probably would like nothing better than to move into the president's office after the cheap Oracle takeover and start firing some people. It is a terrible way to run business, but it makes a lot of sense.
Yes, the could have sold the tablets at a small loss. And, since the Pre 2 phone sells happily in its unlocked state at around $200 in the UK, they could have sold off the Pre 3 for maybe a little more. Legally in the EU they must support the things, so they might as well do it properly. But no...
I happen to like phones with portrait format and keyboards. Some people do. I'm now having to look at the BB Torch 9810 for a next phone. It doesn't look to be as good or as convenient as the Pre 3. OK the screen is smaller that an iPhone's, the processor is slower than on a Samsung. But the actual operation as a phone/messaging device is that much nicer than either. Some people prefer, say, the Prius to an Audi or a BMW. HP just never bothered to find its market and then market to it. Yet if there was a company that could have taken on RIM, it was HP.
No. There is a reason why Python is still a very minority language and Javascript (ECMAScript to be exact) is not. Javascript is good enough. For the great majority, Python is a PITA. Practicality trumps perfectionism, every single time.
Even if only 10% of the zombie touchpads in the field continue to run webOS, the loyal user base will continue to develop for it. Perhaps they are wrong or misguided...but people still buy Morgan cars and build wooden sailboats. And I, wierdo that I am, Bluetooth tether a Pre to an Android tablet and can run the same HTML5 on both.
A sensible idea. The webOS UI and logical menu system would improve Android a lot (I am a sad loser, I have both...) But when did a sensible, logical idea ever get any traction at all in the mirror universe of American industry?
The problem in the US is bad laws.
I am not a lawyer, I don't even pretend to be on the Internet, but I think it is significant that my family includes computer scientists, engineers and lawyers. We all seek to create order out of chaos.
Nokia's problem was, I think, simply that it could not succeed in the US market with an open platform. Google is a US company and the dynamics for Android were different once Motorola adopted it. Because users around the world still look to the US for validation, Nokia felt that they had to have a serious presence in the US market and that meant being beholden to a US company.
As it is, their share price has truly tanked, their institutional investors must be distraught, and before long Microsoft will buy them out of spare change. My own view, for what little it is worth, is that they would have done better to walk completely away from the US market. But then the directors wouldn't have been so rewarded...
As for user innovation, localStorage and webSQL make it possible to develop small Android applications in AJAX which can then be centrally deployed by IT and which will also work on PCs running Chrome.
Conclusion: Shakespeare said it best about the article:
It is a tale
spoken by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Kenyans...when the UK went decimal currency with much moaning and groaning, a retired District Inspector explained how Kenya went metric. The DIs went down the market early with new sets of weights and measures, conversion charts and handouts. They sat down with the market traders and explained the new system, that it was simpler than the old one, and how it worked. The traders converted their prices. By lunchtime the market was running on metric.
An education system that prioritises arithmetic and language skills, and a country where education is seen as opening avenues, can have a lot going for it.
Samsung is relatively naive and comes from a country where people innovate rather than litigate. It was possible to ambush them. Apple ambushing HP would result in their being crushed by an elephant.
Visa/Mastercard > Exxon >= {Oracle|IBM|HP} > Microsoft > Apple.
Her first name is actually Mwende
Once in Switzerland he seriously proposed a route that was 3 sides of a square because the fourth side was the (very) scenic route. I overruled him and took the fourth side, while he complained for the next hour and a half that we would be "late", right till we got to the airport nearly two hours early.
GPS was made for people like him, though I wonder if he has looked for one with an "avoid mountain passes" option.
This thing just smells of trolling for a research grant.
And, by the way, even with the proper definition of order of magnitude (fifth root of 100, not 10 - Wikipedia is wrong here because the term was invented for astronomy) coal and sunshine are not orders of magnitude cheaper than avgas, unless you factor in those transport and protection costs. Which I suspect will prove to be identical.
My father is 88. Last year I noticed his Ubuntu desktop had changed and I asked how. It had invited him to update to the next LTS release, he had followed the instructions. He is a retired lawyer, not a programmer.
For instance, suppose I register a box with round corners. Now you show that the real reason for round corners is so that the box, designed to go in a pocket, will not put too much stress on the pocket material. It is a human factors improvement; it should not be usable as a design copyright.
I'm sure that Samsung will be actively pursuing any way of showing that Apple's tablet design follows naturally from engineering factors for a portable computer. Meanwhile, Apple had better hope its new manufacturing partners don't start to worry about which of their products it might go after.