Fortunately for them, I guess they have a real CEO and not someone who plays one on Slashdot.
Did you give your advice to Apple back around the year 2000?
Blackberry hardware isn't bad when you consider where and how it would be used. Non-replaceable batteries and shiny fragile cases are fine for first world people who regard gadgets as disposable. Sub-one day battery life is fine if you are always near a socket. But in large emerging markets, phones are an expensive purchase, long battery life and easy replacement are still important, a degree of drop-proofness is very desirable and the Blackberry data compression represents a significant reduction in outgoings.Putting a BB OS on some generic smartphone hardware is going to result in something that might be a bit cheaper but will cause customer dissatisfaction.
It took too long to get the new CEO on board, but at least RIM has a coherent strategy and a target market - the middle classes in South America, Africa and Indonesia, business users, and people who just do not like giving up all their data to Apple or Google. They may be about to go tits up, but they are at least avoiding your suggestion - which worked so well for Leo The Pharmacist at HP, and which was sensibly avoided by Apple.
Outside the US, it is very easy to get cheap contracts with limited voice time. RIM is actually expanding outside the US - I suspect some of their problems there are caused by the carrier monopoly. I'm amazed that US customers put up with the restrictions on the phone models they can use, and the inability to get a decent SIM-only contract.
Linguists say that Greek is a primitive language because it is over-complicated. Modern languages are simplified and it is easier to express complex ideas in them. An educated Greek might be familiar with perhaps 5 to 10 books. Roger Bacon spent the equivalent of half a million dollars on about 24 books for his college library. I have a few hundred books in 5 different languages, all of which I have read, and I'm just a typical educated modern European. I could go on, but you are wrong. Knowing one language with a messy grammar, a small vocabulary and a lot of ambiguity doesn't make you super-intelligent.
The Middle Eastern empires, and Rome, organised food and agriculture. It's in the Bible, even - Joseph gets promoted because he's such a good planner for dealing with famines. The 'priests' of Sumer kept family details on clay tablets to organise welfare in hard times. Egyptian peasants were highly taxed to maintain the grain stores. The exact opposite is true; those highly successful societies had a high degree of social organisation, and the peasants left planning to the educated class.
The average Spartan? That would be a malnourished and short lived helot. I suspect you are thinking of the military aristocracy. Probably about 5% of the population. And your point was?
We had an 'edited' Shakespeare text at school. Our English teacher took great delight in pointing out that the really rude jokes had been left in because the editor didn't understand them, so a comment about the bagpipes causing some people to urinate were removed, while jokes about vaginas weren't.
The opposite is true. Some of the British aristocracy, including the king who abdicated, were supporters of Hitler and wanted to introduce Naziism into the UK. Hitler hoped to conquer the East first so that Germany would be powerful enough to defeat the British Empire. The UK entered the war a little too late for a quick victory (before the defeat of Czechoslovakia, concerted effort by the democratic countries could have destroyed Hitler.) We then had to hold out until Roosevelt was able to overcome the Nazi sympathisers in his own country and enter the War.
With Naziism a resurgent threat in Greece and trying to expand all across Europe, with American Republicans who express ideas as right wing and bonkers as those of Hitler, it's nice to know that the Kent police are so on top of things that they can find someone to deal with these serious hate crimes.
Your argument is weakened because Mary Whitehouse was a national joke. If she complained about a TV programme, the head of the BBC used to send the producer a congratulatory memo. We in the UK are suffering from idiocy being stirred up by the gutter press.
We are part of the EU and we follow EU law on human rights (much as the Conservatives would like to repeal it). Article 19 of the UDHR says "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." So you are wrong.
Where we differ from the US, and I personally support this difference, is that we do not recognise that everybody has a right to insult or defame other people. As the Dean of my college remarked, many years ago, "We have people in this college of violently opposed opinions, we have Communists and capitalists, we have atheists and religious people. We expect them to discuss their differences in a civilised manner."
On Sunday last our SOF Meeting took place when the Remembrance Day procession was taking place in town. Nobody wore a poppy, and after the meeting we heard from someone who had been brought up among the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. We are not likely to have problems with the police.
I have. I've spent some time in the Strangers' Gallery at the Commons, and I've compared experiences with people who have visited the House of Representatives. I can assure you that karma-whoring, drama queening and the like occur with depressing regularity in both places. Did you know that in the HoR they even have a kind of fake PR stunt where Congresspeople are filmed making speeches to an empty chamber so they can show them back home to make it look as though they are taking part in debates? At least in the UK we haven't got quite that far yet.
To a politician, "useful speech" is something that attracts votes or money.
Good heavens! I must have missed that because I was too busy hearing about what actually happened. Which was very thoroughly reported. (I guess you are a racist troll because anybody who actually knows anything knows that the riots started in Tottenham, which is in North London, and spread to the East later. People living in high rise flats on very little money were looking out of their windows and seeing vast amounts of cash spent on the Olympics and huge shopping centres they could not afford to visit, their allotments were being stolen, jobs were hard to find, and it seems nobody thought they might resent it.) As for "East London was set on fire" - I wonder if you have ever even been in the UK? East London is huge. There were localised outbreaks of trouble. But your description is wild hyperbole.
It reminds me of visiting South Africa in 1980. People were asking me what it was like being bombed. They found it hard to grasp that Northern Ireland was two hundred and fifty miles away from where I lived, and that through the entire period of the Troubles hardly any part of the rest of the UK outside London was affected.
Presumably works for the Daily Mail. Apparently the people who work for it actually think it is a newspaper. As do its readers....but most of them can't lift their hands to operate a keyboard, or they fall over.
Go back to trying to read "Atlas Shrugged". (Yes, it isn't just you, it is unreadable gobbledegook). The BBC is in competition for audiences with the commercial channels and the audience statistics are regularly reported. It has, if anything, an excess of bodies supervising it. It produces programmes that earn foreign currency around the world. To put things into perspective, a television licence in the UK costs about a quarter as much as a Sky subscription.
The existence of the BBC forces the independent television channels to keep advertising to acceptable limits, unlike US TV where the adverts sometimes overwhelm what is supposed to be the content.
Our system isn't perfect, but anyone with a functioning brain who compares UK television output to US television output will realise that 5 times the population is not able to support anything like five times as much good television.
Time for you to go back to college and do a course in quality management. You can buy very expensive cars that are badly made and of poor quality - Lamborghinis that catch fire, for instance. The Honda Accord is built with excellent consistency to meet its advertised specification. That is quality
Going very fast and using expensive materials is not excellent quality. The definition of an engineer is someone who can do, over and over again, for 10c, what anybody can do once for a dollar.
Mao was a Maoist. The last Communist in Indo-China was Ho Chi Minh, and he only was a Communist because the Americans wouldn't support his proposals for a moderate socialist Government (he lived in England for a while and wanted something like the Labour Party).
I don't know about LCDs, but most industrial processes need a lot of cleaning fluid. Electroplating and other coating and surface treatment processes often have to have metal contents in the effluent down in the parts per billion. There is a limit to what filtering, treatment and precipitation can achieve, and often the simplest solution (literally) is to use lots of water. (Before anybody gets uptight about nasty pollution from industry, the worst water pollution is actually the crap manufacturers put in shampoo, shower gel and the like, along with the hormones and antibiotics we and our farm animals leak out into the rivers and sewage systems).
You do know that he lived in Oxford, in an urban environment, and that the original of Fangorn is a small clump of trees in the Fellows' Garden of his college? Tolkien wanted a sanitised, managed environment; but he wanted other people to pay for it.
I think we get that Tolkien had it in for technology, but he was hardly subtle about it. When I was interviewed for Durham, (UK university) I had a most interesting discussion with the college admissions tutor about C P Snow and the "two cultures" - the deep separation between science and the arts in the UK. He thought that people like Tolkien really did not understand civilisation at quite a deep level, and were afraid of technology because it had led to social mobility - the middle and upper classes didn't like the way that engineers and the companies they started made so much money, and they couldn't rely on "connections" to get their children into them - mathematical and practical ability was needed.
On this reading, Tolkien's creation of Sauron as an embodiment of evil is just the British class system at work.
All the "good guys" in Tolkien are one percenters; even the Baggins are very rich. So you could say that Tolkien was a kind of Republican shock-jock, he just didn't think of writing that Sauron was actually born in Kenya, and was a Muslim Communist.
I like the Terry Pratchett version [plot spoiler alert], in which the entire plot of LOTR turns out to have occurred in a backward, barbaric country, and missionaries are sent out to rescue the surviving Orcs.
This myth is constantly repeated because most classicists weren't terribly good at sociology. In "Democratic" Athens you got the vote if you were a male citizen, which meant you had to be able to enter war as a hoplite, i.e. an armored soldier with a couple of servants. In the modern USA this would mean, in practical terms, that the vote was only given to male armed forces members with the rank of Corporal or above. Athenian democracy was in fact a military oligarchy which extended the vote down the ranks. 95% of the Athenian population didn't have the vote. It was far from "mob rule". Socrates had served as a hoplite and we now know he was probably executed because he was in favor of removing the popular vote and limiting government to the aristocracy - i.e. the military officer class. (I got this years ago from a woman professor of Ancient Greek, whose view on Athenian democracy was that, if anything, it was little better than Sparta - where at last upper class women had equality with upper class men.)
Meanwhile, the UK started to adopt democracy in 1832, and if anything has improved in the last few years. I notice no increase in "mob rule". If anything, the chief proponent of mob rule - Rupert Murdoch - has rather lost influence recently.
I identified the things that, if they happened to the US economy, would be a net benefit to the rest of the world. I do not expect that they will necessarily happen if Obama returns. But I can be fairly sure that under Romney the corporate rape of the American middle class would get worse, not better.
Compared to Romney, Obama is likely to be somewhat less friendly to hedge funds and private equity companies, since they drive up prices and reduce jobs and wages for the profit of individuals. Full employment in the US, more middle class spending power, and lower commodity prices are better for everybody. More money in the hands of the very few is bad for everybody else. Romney is a representative of exactly those very few.
Assuming the forklift causes damage, the answer is that you send out a technician with the proper equipment, and they make a patch good enough to get the aircraft back for a fully assessed repair. Unlike steel or aluminum, the repair process itself does not affect surrounding material. Welding steel or aluminum is a real problem when the metal has been heat treated - as are almost all aircraft alloys.
It is not absurdly strong. Unlike aluminum and alloy steel, composites do not have a fatigue life. The issue is not with elongation of the metal, but the cracking caused by repeated application of stress. This is why constant inspection is needed for metal aircraft around high stress areas. Composites, if protected from chemical and radiation attack, last virtually forever if they are operated within the defined stress envelope, while metals typically have a maximum fatigue life for any level of repetitive stress, including engine vibration as well as actual deformation doe to load.
I don't know exactly what Boeing use but I would assume it was carbon/aramid composite because aramids are better at energy absorbtion and do not have such a high Young's modulus, which is why modern boat hulls are made of aramid/epoxy composite with carbon fiber reinforcement to reduce deformation in areas that need stiffness.
As an example of the fatigue life of these composites, consider Ben Ainslie's boat in the last three Olympics. It has been the same one...before carbon/aramid, boats used for one Olympics had to be replaced because of the damage caused by the stresses. Yet the carbon/aramid hull is lighter.
I am over 60 and I disagree. A lot depends on how you lived in your twenties and thirties. If you have stayed fit all your life, maintained correct weight, avoided alcohol, tobacco, conspicuous consumption (and possibly firearms), your fifties and sixties is when you suddenly reap the benefits as you now have the money to do things and the kids have grown up,
Slashdot Mirror
Did you give your advice to Apple back around the year 2000?
Blackberry hardware isn't bad when you consider where and how it would be used. Non-replaceable batteries and shiny fragile cases are fine for first world people who regard gadgets as disposable. Sub-one day battery life is fine if you are always near a socket. But in large emerging markets, phones are an expensive purchase, long battery life and easy replacement are still important, a degree of drop-proofness is very desirable and the Blackberry data compression represents a significant reduction in outgoings.Putting a BB OS on some generic smartphone hardware is going to result in something that might be a bit cheaper but will cause customer dissatisfaction.
It took too long to get the new CEO on board, but at least RIM has a coherent strategy and a target market - the middle classes in South America, Africa and Indonesia, business users, and people who just do not like giving up all their data to Apple or Google. They may be about to go tits up, but they are at least avoiding your suggestion - which worked so well for Leo The Pharmacist at HP, and which was sensibly avoided by Apple.
Outside the US, it is very easy to get cheap contracts with limited voice time. RIM is actually expanding outside the US - I suspect some of their problems there are caused by the carrier monopoly. I'm amazed that US customers put up with the restrictions on the phone models they can use, and the inability to get a decent SIM-only contract.
Linguists say that Greek is a primitive language because it is over-complicated. Modern languages are simplified and it is easier to express complex ideas in them. An educated Greek might be familiar with perhaps 5 to 10 books. Roger Bacon spent the equivalent of half a million dollars on about 24 books for his college library. I have a few hundred books in 5 different languages, all of which I have read, and I'm just a typical educated modern European. I could go on, but you are wrong. Knowing one language with a messy grammar, a small vocabulary and a lot of ambiguity doesn't make you super-intelligent.
The Middle Eastern empires, and Rome, organised food and agriculture. It's in the Bible, even - Joseph gets promoted because he's such a good planner for dealing with famines. The 'priests' of Sumer kept family details on clay tablets to organise welfare in hard times. Egyptian peasants were highly taxed to maintain the grain stores. The exact opposite is true; those highly successful societies had a high degree of social organisation, and the peasants left planning to the educated class.
The average Spartan? That would be a malnourished and short lived helot. I suspect you are thinking of the military aristocracy. Probably about 5% of the population. And your point was?
We had an 'edited' Shakespeare text at school. Our English teacher took great delight in pointing out that the really rude jokes had been left in because the editor didn't understand them, so a comment about the bagpipes causing some people to urinate were removed, while jokes about vaginas weren't.
With Naziism a resurgent threat in Greece and trying to expand all across Europe, with American Republicans who express ideas as right wing and bonkers as those of Hitler, it's nice to know that the Kent police are so on top of things that they can find someone to deal with these serious hate crimes.
Your argument is weakened because Mary Whitehouse was a national joke. If she complained about a TV programme, the head of the BBC used to send the producer a congratulatory memo. We in the UK are suffering from idiocy being stirred up by the gutter press.
Where we differ from the US, and I personally support this difference, is that we do not recognise that everybody has a right to insult or defame other people. As the Dean of my college remarked, many years ago, "We have people in this college of violently opposed opinions, we have Communists and capitalists, we have atheists and religious people. We expect them to discuss their differences in a civilised manner."
On Sunday last our SOF Meeting took place when the Remembrance Day procession was taking place in town. Nobody wore a poppy, and after the meeting we heard from someone who had been brought up among the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. We are not likely to have problems with the police.
To a politician, "useful speech" is something that attracts votes or money.
It reminds me of visiting South Africa in 1980. People were asking me what it was like being bombed. They found it hard to grasp that Northern Ireland was two hundred and fifty miles away from where I lived, and that through the entire period of the Troubles hardly any part of the rest of the UK outside London was affected.
Presumably works for the Daily Mail. Apparently the people who work for it actually think it is a newspaper. As do its readers....but most of them can't lift their hands to operate a keyboard, or they fall over.
The existence of the BBC forces the independent television channels to keep advertising to acceptable limits, unlike US TV where the adverts sometimes overwhelm what is supposed to be the content.
Our system isn't perfect, but anyone with a functioning brain who compares UK television output to US television output will realise that 5 times the population is not able to support anything like five times as much good television.
Going very fast and using expensive materials is not excellent quality. The definition of an engineer is someone who can do, over and over again, for 10c, what anybody can do once for a dollar.
Mao was a Maoist. The last Communist in Indo-China was Ho Chi Minh, and he only was a Communist because the Americans wouldn't support his proposals for a moderate socialist Government (he lived in England for a while and wanted something like the Labour Party).
I don't know about LCDs, but most industrial processes need a lot of cleaning fluid. Electroplating and other coating and surface treatment processes often have to have metal contents in the effluent down in the parts per billion. There is a limit to what filtering, treatment and precipitation can achieve, and often the simplest solution (literally) is to use lots of water. (Before anybody gets uptight about nasty pollution from industry, the worst water pollution is actually the crap manufacturers put in shampoo, shower gel and the like, along with the hormones and antibiotics we and our farm animals leak out into the rivers and sewage systems).
You do know that he lived in Oxford, in an urban environment, and that the original of Fangorn is a small clump of trees in the Fellows' Garden of his college? Tolkien wanted a sanitised, managed environment; but he wanted other people to pay for it.
They are what some of the dinosaur lines evolved into.
On this reading, Tolkien's creation of Sauron as an embodiment of evil is just the British class system at work.
All the "good guys" in Tolkien are one percenters; even the Baggins are very rich. So you could say that Tolkien was a kind of Republican shock-jock, he just didn't think of writing that Sauron was actually born in Kenya, and was a Muslim Communist.
I like the Terry Pratchett version [plot spoiler alert], in which the entire plot of LOTR turns out to have occurred in a backward, barbaric country, and missionaries are sent out to rescue the surviving Orcs.
Meanwhile, the UK started to adopt democracy in 1832, and if anything has improved in the last few years. I notice no increase in "mob rule". If anything, the chief proponent of mob rule - Rupert Murdoch - has rather lost influence recently.
I identified the things that, if they happened to the US economy, would be a net benefit to the rest of the world. I do not expect that they will necessarily happen if Obama returns. But I can be fairly sure that under Romney the corporate rape of the American middle class would get worse, not better.
Compared to Romney, Obama is likely to be somewhat less friendly to hedge funds and private equity companies, since they drive up prices and reduce jobs and wages for the profit of individuals. Full employment in the US, more middle class spending power, and lower commodity prices are better for everybody. More money in the hands of the very few is bad for everybody else. Romney is a representative of exactly those very few.
Assuming the forklift causes damage, the answer is that you send out a technician with the proper equipment, and they make a patch good enough to get the aircraft back for a fully assessed repair. Unlike steel or aluminum, the repair process itself does not affect surrounding material. Welding steel or aluminum is a real problem when the metal has been heat treated - as are almost all aircraft alloys.
I don't know exactly what Boeing use but I would assume it was carbon/aramid composite because aramids are better at energy absorbtion and do not have such a high Young's modulus, which is why modern boat hulls are made of aramid/epoxy composite with carbon fiber reinforcement to reduce deformation in areas that need stiffness.
As an example of the fatigue life of these composites, consider Ben Ainslie's boat in the last three Olympics. It has been the same one...before carbon/aramid, boats used for one Olympics had to be replaced because of the damage caused by the stresses. Yet the carbon/aramid hull is lighter.
Guess what I'm making my new boat hull out of?
I am over 60 and I disagree. A lot depends on how you lived in your twenties and thirties. If you have stayed fit all your life, maintained correct weight, avoided alcohol, tobacco, conspicuous consumption (and possibly firearms), your fifties and sixties is when you suddenly reap the benefits as you now have the money to do things and the kids have grown up,