The CIA vaccination thing actually reads like some kind of fan service to conspiracy theorists...
The actual CIA, actually using a vaccine plot to gather DNA in an effort to direct an officially nonexistent model of stealth black helicopter carrying a kill team composed of officially nonexistent commandos to the correct target. Seriously, most conspiracy theories don't pack that much conspiracy theory...
There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
Even if one is happy to stand back and let the colorful natives be colorful(either because you'd rather not pick on their culture, or because it's just too much of a pain in the ass), the trouble in this case is that anywhere polio is allowed to remain endemic is a reservoir just waiting for a stroke of bad luck to make it back into the wider population.
Were the threat to local children some sort of non-contagious local superstition, we'd have the luxury of deciding whether or not to play cultural relativism. With polio, though, the question is whether we hunt it down wherever it hides, incidentally pissing off some locals and saving some babies, or whether we put up with the risk of having a serious outbreak at any time, almost anywhere...
I tried camping once. The experience helped shape my current "head for a decent bar located as close as possible to something worth nuking and attempt to be vaporized with a gin and tonic in hand" strategy for apocalypse management...
Deception, theft, betrayal, and violent death are certainly common outcomes; but that's the major reason(second only to the fact that even small-scale division of labor beats the hell out of farming alone) why cooperation is rewarded: It is very difficult to prepare yourself against all acts of violence or deception. It is easier to have people know that yes, they could stab you while your back is turned; but they'll be shitting teeth for weeks when your displeased kin group shows up for revenge if they actually try it...
(Also, just as a matter of terminology, concepts like 'socialism' aren't really very well defined, if they mean anything at all, on the scale we are talking about here. Only once you have a nation state, some amount of surplus production, a mechanism(usually currency, since agricultural commodities are heavy and perishable) for distributing or redistributing that surplus, and some degree of fraying in legacy social frameworks does it really make sense to start using words that more or less imply positions about how state power should be deployed to modify economic outcomes. It also helps to have enough technology that your society has capital goods other than agricultural land and enough bureaucratic development that the state can actually execute policies in any useful sense.)
As somebody essentially bereft of understanding of this 'quantum' stuff, I refuse to be satisfied until MIT develops a new magnetic state that both aids and hinders quantum computing until disturbed, at which point it only does one or the other!
I'm pretty sure that if your response to a problem is "throw money at it, anything else is dreadfully downmarket.", you do not, in fact, have a 'survivor mentality'...
In other news, buying a black, hard-anodized, aluminum flashlight makes you 'tactical'.
There are probably a billion, maybe two, people that we could ask this question even without the downfall of civilization as we know it; but I'm not sure that they could tell us anything useful...
Is he, by any chance, friends with the 'freedom ship' guys who manage to update the 3D rendering of the bitchin' bioshock libertarian aqua-paradise that they are totally going to be building real soon now every few years?
The number one thing you need to survive the coming apocalypse (which isn't actually coming) is a community that works together. Stock rice and beans, but instead of stockpiling ammo, get to know your neighbor. You won't have to shoot them, then.
If human history is anything to go by, you'll unfortunately have to master both skills. Not only do you have to be good enough neighbors that your attempt at agriculture doesn't end in mass starvation and not too many disagreements over the neighborhood's offspring and their foolish dating choices end in generations-long blood feuds; but you also have to be ready for a more or less constant series of meat-grinder skirmishes with the guys who live a valley over from you, all for reasons that are largely inchoate but will seem like a big deal at the time...
Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of confidence in second-through-Nth-strike capabilities, it doesn't necessarily have to be the case that a nuclear war would involve everybody shouting FIRE ZE MISSILES!!! and launching the world's supply of strategic nukes. If confidence in second strike is very low, or is based entirely on a 'we can get our rockets off the ground in the time between when theirs pop up on the big board and when they hit', then it will be over hard and fast. If, though, you assume a much more robust and survivable capability(missile subs, widely distributed 'Davy Crocket' style low-yield tactical devices in the hands of military units, significant optimism about how hard your bunkers really are) you might see a relatively prolonged exchange of a mixture of tactical and strategic weapons, with massive destruction of centralize infrastructure(the US gulf coast refining capacity, say) in the first few hours or days; but a fairly large number of civilians who avoid nuclear annihilation in favor of dying in the rubble.
You could also postulate a scenario where the government's ability to execute coherent strategies like 'seize all the shelters' is what collapses relatively early(for economic reasons, because of a successful nuclear decapitation, some sort of nasty plague, etc.), with various well-armed-but-ill-led armed forces fragments and numerous-but-hapless civilians left to figure things out by trial and error.
Now, it isn't obvious that any of these scenarios actually makes a short duration bomb shelter worth having access to; but some of them would give you a chance to drive to your tomb and close the door before the supermutants get you.
I have to wonder if the perversely optimistic nature of most 'survival' plans(optimistic compared to, say, a collapse of complex social systems where service industries don't just spring up again to take your hoarded gold in exchange for fresh food, not optimistic compared to non-collapse scenarios) has to do with psychological self-selection....
The greater one's confidence in one's own individual agency, capability, ability to achieve goals, etc. as opposed to a general lack of confidence or overt recognition of dependence in some areas of life, the more likely somebody might be to treat surviving an apocalypse of some flavor as a plausible goal. However, the same sorts of traits frequently predispose people to adopt vaguely antisocial and tech-heavy solutions for a problem that is (short of magic nanites or something) unlikely to be solvable alone.
In terms of surviving hostile conditions and the closest thing to isolation from modern society that the planet currently has to offer, empirical observation pretty much forces you to bet on the various relatively low-tech, clannish, kin groups that have lots of experience with scrounging in their own squalor. It isn't a pretty strategy; but it has worked for essentially the entire period between the evolution of Homo Sapiens and the rise of agricultural civilization(and for a time thereafter, albeit only in places marginal enough that agricultural civilizations couldn't be bothered to send in the army for a bit of the old 'civilizing').
By contrast, your techie-nerd survival-through-gadgets-and-stockpiles types can be expected to last only slightly longer than their MRE supply...
Honestly, this story would be much better if each little habi-pod had its own fucked-up dystopian social engineering theme. Much more interesting that the generic 'thermonuclear Marriott' shtick.
1. Law is passed in an attempt to curtail your behavior.
2. You object to this law and wish to continue doing whatever the fuck you want.
3. You implement the most annoying clickwrap contract-of-adhesion you can come up with to stay within the letter of the law, continue doing whatever the fuck you want, and imply to your customers that regulatory meany-heads are to blame for their experience sucking.
I'm certainly no corporate-governance-and-structuring expert; but that really seems like something that would be worth fixing. The 'Innovator's Dilemma' problem, that timeOday was referring to, is a real one, and has a reasonable number of cases that people have had a chance to observe in the wild. Often, it isn't pretty. At worst, the company dies writhing in a puddle of its own red ink and vomit. At best, the company has enough inertia and legacy clients to just chop off whatever appendage is bleeding the most and do something different(see IBM, say, which seems to be doing fine now; but pretty much got nuked out of the client hardware and software business by Wintel, and had a rather unpleasant period.)
I'm sure the professional M&A jockies and corporate bankruptcy chop-shoppers are just fine with the present model, since they feed on the ugly transition points; but the less sophisticated shareholders, the employees, and even the customers seem less than ideally served.
I have spoken to a few people in management consulting, for a number of industries, and they tell of a strong 'action bias' among their customers: They get called in to decide if a given project is a good idea or not, or to do a valuation model for some complex asset, so the customer is asking for outside expertise to guide their decision; but they apparently get very unhappy if the answer is "The only winning move is not to play."/"This project's numbers just don't add up, just don't touch it and you'll be better off by approximately how much it would have cost." Neither they nor I pretend to understand whether this is a psychological thing(some sort of 'people desire a feeling of control over their life and environment, action enhances that feeling, just like futily honking in gridlock traffic does, psychobabble, yadda-yadda') or whether it is a rational response to irrationally applied standards for evaluating CVs(as in the sciences, where a study that obtains a negative result is way less sexy than one that obtains a positive result, perhaps people who have big, bold, projects, even if doomed, on their resume have better future prospects than the ones with a boring history marked more by prudent avoidance than risky action); but apparently it's a fairly big bias.
I'd be interested to know how much of this sort of thing is action bias, how much is (misplaced) optimism, and how much comes down to a company being structured such that there is simply no option other than 'grow' or 'die', so even if everybody knows that 'cash out while the leaving is good, with a planned wind-down for the legacy customers' is the right move, it simply isn't on the table.
The complexity, and getting-sued risk, of tech patents are just so high that we need good, honest, businessmen like Intellectual Ventures to help us sort it all out for a small fee...
Seriously, you know that you are a morally bankrupt fucker when you are the one making that argument in your favor. Sure, in countries with shitty regulatory environments and 'rule of law' that exists largely as a punchline, you have a class of professional 'fixers', who know how to make things happen when provided with a suitable supply of grease for the correct palms, along with a supply of thugs to which you can pay for 'protection' to ensure that bad things don't happen. Those, though, at least have the decency to keep their mouths shut, and recognize that they are a symptom of a sick, dysfunctional system. IV has the audacity to argue that needing to hire a fixer and pay protection money for the privilege of selling a product without being nuked into a smoking crater is a good thing. Where is the osteosarcoma fairy when we need her?
But when questioned further, they'll all remember tons of warning signs that they ignored, because nobody gives a shit until somebody starts killing.
The problem with 'warning signs' is that(without a much larger and better constructed study population, which you would be unlikely to get) is selection bias: It is, indeed, very unlikely that somebody who goes in and shoots up the place acted 100% normally in the time leading up to doing so. However, without doing an equally-invasive-and-thorough investigation of a fairly large number of demographically similar non-shooters, how do you separate signal from noise?
Practically any instance of assholery, alienation, or general dark muttering looks like a 'warning sign' once you've gone and emptied a few magazines into cowering elementary school children; but that is diagnostically useless unless you have reason to suspect that a given behavior doesn't show up(or shows up orders of magnitude less frequently) in non spree shooters.
Eh, even frat bros have xboxes now. I'm pretty sure that you have to be able to type in 'HTML Machine Language' in order to be a computer genius these days... Taking the side panel off your case and just running it that way is also useful, like growing a beard if you want to be taken seriously in the humanities.
I don't have anything against VxWorks for embedded systems; but on a router a 'relatively flimsy network stack' is a teeny bit of a liability...
It was also my experience that(not necessarily through the fault of VxWorks per se; but because of the severe RAM cut on the VxWorks models) performance under loads like bittorrent(very high number of simultaneous connections, even if upstream bandwidth kept the overall throughput modest) tended to take a nasty dive earlier than on the models with better specs.
. . . he needs an official declaration that he was never guilty in the first place, and should never have been prosecuted.
I don't know if there is such an instrument; but what we really need for this situation(and a fair few others) is some equivalent of a 'pardon' that constitutes a formal repudiation of the law in question.
"Pardon" = "Guilty; but we'll let it slide because something something or other." What we need is a "Law XYZ was total bullshit, even when it was still on the books, and prosecutions for violation of it, however formally correct, are similarly unjust."
It's perfectly correct not to pardon Turing, there's no evidence that the conviction was procedurally or factually troubled(and selective pardoning of cool guilty people is, if anything, an offense to justice itself); but it is worth noting that the 'crime' he was convicted of never should have been a crime.
It's probably for the best that they are so lousy at predicting the future... Did you see the one for 2006 where they talked about integrating Lotus groupware with some horrible Second Life clone to produce some sort of dystopian 3d cubiclespace hell?
So, IBM's bold futurists predict that sensors and haptic feedback systems that already exist today will become better in 5 years, and some sort of vaguely-referenced-but-woven-through-all-the-predictions 'deep learning' algorithm that we'll lease from IBM will make something magic happen?
Jesus Golgotha-poledancing Christ, the future just isn't what it used to be...
I don't have a good answer for them(nor is it assured that there even is one.) My point was just that the "Acquire Linksys and gimp their stuff" strategy is only viable if there is some barrier to entry that prevents another Linksys from rising in the first one's place. If there are sufficient barriers to entry, buying a competitor and reconfiguring their product line to protect your market can work. If not, though, the best you can hope for is that you delayed the change you are worried about, by picking off the leader/most competent executor of the trend; and, at worst, you might actually be encouraging it, because now "Get bought by Cisco" looks like a plausible cash-out avenue for any VC thinking of backing a network device company...
In the very short term, it may well have actually worked. We'd need to have more specific numbers on Cisco's lowish end gear sales in that time period, vs the cost of acquiring Linksys, and the shifts in the fortunes of Linksys' competitors due to the acquisition. Beyond that term, though, it seems very likely that it could not stem the tide. Linksys may have been ahead of their game when Cisco purchased them; but the other players have been improving, and Cisco can't buy them all, or prevent others from rising up(or, if they did want to prevent them, they'd have to go directly to the source, the SoC spinners like Broadcomm, Aetheros, Marvell, and cripple the steady supply of competent-but-boring low-end router boards for random pacific rim OEMs to shove into boxes, and that would involve serious cash and possible antitrust concerns).
To go with your analogy, Microsoft does have an Android problem(even if Apple is walking away with most of the profits, Android is the one that saturates every mobile niche that Apple doesn't deign to touch and some that it does); but would that make buying, say, HTC, a good idea? Taking out one Android handset vendor might be enough to scuttle the launch of some particular device or set of devices; but there are a number of more or less interchangeable competitors who will fill the gap(especially if you try to cripple and/or raise the price of HTC products in order to reconfigure the mobile market).
I agree with you that Cisco is right to be concerned about companies nibbling in from the low end, I just don't think that they bring anything to the table to solve that problem. The low end doesn't care about compatibility with Cisco's high end configuration mechanisms and features(at best, they might want them but not be willing to pay, at worst, they are actively afraid of them); but Cisco also has minimal-to-zero capability in delivering any low-end products that might be able to synergize with Cisco network hardware in a useful way. The Flip(also killed) might have increased demand for bandwidth in a vague sense; but that's an ISP bottleneck, not something that would trouble any consumer router except the nastiest 802.11b devices(indeed, notably, the 'Flip Share TV' wireless media extender/streamer specifically didn't run on top of a user-visible IP network at all, it used a proprietary dongle on the host PC to drive the media player box). Their video-conferencing stuff, outside of the 'worth-more-than-your-car' range, is similarly a non-event, and they've never made a compelling case that (again, beyond driving a vague demand for better internet connections) you would somehow be better off with a Cisco router. Their 'Media Hub' product was similarly mediocre compared to every other cheapie NAS on the market, and similarly offered no obvious advantage to Cisco/Linksys users compared to users of other network gear. They just don't seem to have anything to offer on the low end.
Honestly, unless they have a markedly better plan, they might well be best off to just milk the hell out of the high end for as long as they can and then quit and go sit on their pile of money.
I'm sure it's undergone minor revision changes since then, But I bet the bulk of the hardware and software remains unchanged since 2003.
Just a note, for the reference of anybody reading this: The WRT-54/GL is very similar to the wildly popular classic WRT-54G that put the 'WRT' in 'OpenWRT' and 'DD-WRT'. However, the WRT-54G(non L) has gone through something like 5 revisions, and the later ones are more or less entirely different animals in the same box. Less flash, less RAM, vxworks(yeah, like hell it works) based firmware, poor compatibility with anything but the most stripped down 3rd-party firmwares. In fact, the 'L' model was actually a re-release of the older revision designed to cater to the enthusiasts who had been alienated by the later revisions of the 54G.
If you go shopping, just be sure you know which is which. I don't know how the 54GL holds up against the newer models from non-linksys sources; but anything being sold as a WRT-54G(unless it specifically specifies one of the earlier, better revision numbers) is shit and probably not worth the money.
I'm personally inclined to wonder if the Cisco Linksys acquisition was really an optimistic attempt to kneecap a potential competitor(Linksys certainly didn't have the really classy stuff, like redundant PSUs and such, nor did it have ios-equivalent commands to make your enterprise admins happy; but the capabilities of a relatively feeble ARM/MIPS SoC running linux were getting uncomfortably close to those of Cisco's ~$500-ish branch-office routers, and Linksys was putting out some definitely-adequate-for-the-money not-wholly-unmanaged rack switches and things) that ended up underestimating how quickly the utter crap segment would move toward adequacy.
Before the market's maturation, there was some genuine shit being sold as consumer network gear(and there still is, if you get unlucky, though it's harder to feel cheated when your $15 allegedly-wireless-N router flakes out after 6 months than it was back when your $80-$100 allegedly-wireless-B router flakes out after 6 months of only actually connecting to your laptop half the time); but the basic strategy of shoving a modestly powerful SoC from one of the major wireless vendors onto a more-or-less reference design PCB and equipping it either with Linux(on the high end) or VXworks(for the real cheap seats) is something that even the nastiest bottom feeders can usually get mostly right. The firmware will usually be terrible; but the nasty bottom feeders also have no real incentive to lock out 3rd-party firmware, which has gotten pretty decent.
If the consumer/SOHO networking market still looked like it did when Linksys was purchased, the buy might actually have been a good idea: assimilate the company that was getting a little uppity in terms of feature sets for the money, bump the prices on their classier gear, nerf the features on their lower end stuff, and call it a day. Trouble is, outside of the extremely low end(where margins are so tight that you can't even be sure that the wall-wart won't set your house on fire), shoving SoCs in plastic boxes is totally commodified and firmware(while each vendor seems to have a perverse desire to roll their own shitty version, rather than just slapping a lightly branded OpenWRT build on it) has gotten better over time, and still has a marginal cost of $0 to ship the nicest and most featureful build you have available to you. That's just not a place where Cisco can win: Cisco has a high-margin/lots of features market to protect, so they do incur a cost if they start shipping their good firmware on cheap hardware; but 'tenda' or 'trendnet' or any other "Who the hell are they?" outfit has nothing to lose and everything to gain if their firmware is as good as it can possibly be. They don't necessarily have the cash to actually write good firmware, and that firmware won't be running on good hardware; but even bad hardware can be pretty good, and the overall quality of embedded linuxes has gotten significantly better.
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The CIA vaccination thing actually reads like some kind of fan service to conspiracy theorists...
The actual CIA, actually using a vaccine plot to gather DNA in an effort to direct an officially nonexistent model of stealth black helicopter carrying a kill team composed of officially nonexistent commandos to the correct target. Seriously, most conspiracy theories don't pack that much conspiracy theory...
There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
Even if one is happy to stand back and let the colorful natives be colorful(either because you'd rather not pick on their culture, or because it's just too much of a pain in the ass), the trouble in this case is that anywhere polio is allowed to remain endemic is a reservoir just waiting for a stroke of bad luck to make it back into the wider population.
Were the threat to local children some sort of non-contagious local superstition, we'd have the luxury of deciding whether or not to play cultural relativism. With polio, though, the question is whether we hunt it down wherever it hides, incidentally pissing off some locals and saving some babies, or whether we put up with the risk of having a serious outbreak at any time, almost anywhere...
I tried camping once. The experience helped shape my current "head for a decent bar located as close as possible to something worth nuking and attempt to be vaporized with a gin and tonic in hand" strategy for apocalypse management...
Deception, theft, betrayal, and violent death are certainly common outcomes; but that's the major reason(second only to the fact that even small-scale division of labor beats the hell out of farming alone) why cooperation is rewarded: It is very difficult to prepare yourself against all acts of violence or deception. It is easier to have people know that yes, they could stab you while your back is turned; but they'll be shitting teeth for weeks when your displeased kin group shows up for revenge if they actually try it...
(Also, just as a matter of terminology, concepts like 'socialism' aren't really very well defined, if they mean anything at all, on the scale we are talking about here. Only once you have a nation state, some amount of surplus production, a mechanism(usually currency, since agricultural commodities are heavy and perishable) for distributing or redistributing that surplus, and some degree of fraying in legacy social frameworks does it really make sense to start using words that more or less imply positions about how state power should be deployed to modify economic outcomes. It also helps to have enough technology that your society has capital goods other than agricultural land and enough bureaucratic development that the state can actually execute policies in any useful sense.)
As somebody essentially bereft of understanding of this 'quantum' stuff, I refuse to be satisfied until MIT develops a new magnetic state that both aids and hinders quantum computing until disturbed, at which point it only does one or the other!
I'm pretty sure that if your response to a problem is "throw money at it, anything else is dreadfully downmarket.", you do not, in fact, have a 'survivor mentality'...
In other news, buying a black, hard-anodized, aluminum flashlight makes you 'tactical'.
"Wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead?"
There are probably a billion, maybe two, people that we could ask this question even without the downfall of civilization as we know it; but I'm not sure that they could tell us anything useful...
Is he, by any chance, friends with the 'freedom ship' guys who manage to update the 3D rendering of the bitchin' bioshock libertarian aqua-paradise that they are totally going to be building real soon now every few years?
Mod parent up, please.
The number one thing you need to survive the coming apocalypse (which isn't actually coming) is a community that works together. Stock rice and beans, but instead of stockpiling ammo, get to know your neighbor. You won't have to shoot them, then.
If human history is anything to go by, you'll unfortunately have to master both skills. Not only do you have to be good enough neighbors that your attempt at agriculture doesn't end in mass starvation and not too many disagreements over the neighborhood's offspring and their foolish dating choices end in generations-long blood feuds; but you also have to be ready for a more or less constant series of meat-grinder skirmishes with the guys who live a valley over from you, all for reasons that are largely inchoate but will seem like a big deal at the time...
There are other alternatives, also unpalatable:
Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of confidence in second-through-Nth-strike capabilities, it doesn't necessarily have to be the case that a nuclear war would involve everybody shouting FIRE ZE MISSILES!!! and launching the world's supply of strategic nukes. If confidence in second strike is very low, or is based entirely on a 'we can get our rockets off the ground in the time between when theirs pop up on the big board and when they hit', then it will be over hard and fast. If, though, you assume a much more robust and survivable capability(missile subs, widely distributed 'Davy Crocket' style low-yield tactical devices in the hands of military units, significant optimism about how hard your bunkers really are) you might see a relatively prolonged exchange of a mixture of tactical and strategic weapons, with massive destruction of centralize infrastructure(the US gulf coast refining capacity, say) in the first few hours or days; but a fairly large number of civilians who avoid nuclear annihilation in favor of dying in the rubble.
You could also postulate a scenario where the government's ability to execute coherent strategies like 'seize all the shelters' is what collapses relatively early(for economic reasons, because of a successful nuclear decapitation, some sort of nasty plague, etc.), with various well-armed-but-ill-led armed forces fragments and numerous-but-hapless civilians left to figure things out by trial and error.
Now, it isn't obvious that any of these scenarios actually makes a short duration bomb shelter worth having access to; but some of them would give you a chance to drive to your tomb and close the door before the supermutants get you.
I have to wonder if the perversely optimistic nature of most 'survival' plans(optimistic compared to, say, a collapse of complex social systems where service industries don't just spring up again to take your hoarded gold in exchange for fresh food, not optimistic compared to non-collapse scenarios) has to do with psychological self-selection....
The greater one's confidence in one's own individual agency, capability, ability to achieve goals, etc. as opposed to a general lack of confidence or overt recognition of dependence in some areas of life, the more likely somebody might be to treat surviving an apocalypse of some flavor as a plausible goal. However, the same sorts of traits frequently predispose people to adopt vaguely antisocial and tech-heavy solutions for a problem that is (short of magic nanites or something) unlikely to be solvable alone.
In terms of surviving hostile conditions and the closest thing to isolation from modern society that the planet currently has to offer, empirical observation pretty much forces you to bet on the various relatively low-tech, clannish, kin groups that have lots of experience with scrounging in their own squalor. It isn't a pretty strategy; but it has worked for essentially the entire period between the evolution of Homo Sapiens and the rise of agricultural civilization(and for a time thereafter, albeit only in places marginal enough that agricultural civilizations couldn't be bothered to send in the army for a bit of the old 'civilizing').
By contrast, your techie-nerd survival-through-gadgets-and-stockpiles types can be expected to last only slightly longer than their MRE supply...
Vault tec comes to life
Honestly, this story would be much better if each little habi-pod had its own fucked-up dystopian social engineering theme. Much more interesting that the generic 'thermonuclear Marriott' shtick.
1. Law is passed in an attempt to curtail your behavior.
2. You object to this law and wish to continue doing whatever the fuck you want.
3. You implement the most annoying clickwrap contract-of-adhesion you can come up with to stay within the letter of the law, continue doing whatever the fuck you want, and imply to your customers that regulatory meany-heads are to blame for their experience sucking.
4. Profit!
I'm certainly no corporate-governance-and-structuring expert; but that really seems like something that would be worth fixing. The 'Innovator's Dilemma' problem, that timeOday was referring to, is a real one, and has a reasonable number of cases that people have had a chance to observe in the wild. Often, it isn't pretty. At worst, the company dies writhing in a puddle of its own red ink and vomit. At best, the company has enough inertia and legacy clients to just chop off whatever appendage is bleeding the most and do something different(see IBM, say, which seems to be doing fine now; but pretty much got nuked out of the client hardware and software business by Wintel, and had a rather unpleasant period.)
I'm sure the professional M&A jockies and corporate bankruptcy chop-shoppers are just fine with the present model, since they feed on the ugly transition points; but the less sophisticated shareholders, the employees, and even the customers seem less than ideally served.
I have spoken to a few people in management consulting, for a number of industries, and they tell of a strong 'action bias' among their customers: They get called in to decide if a given project is a good idea or not, or to do a valuation model for some complex asset, so the customer is asking for outside expertise to guide their decision; but they apparently get very unhappy if the answer is "The only winning move is not to play."/"This project's numbers just don't add up, just don't touch it and you'll be better off by approximately how much it would have cost." Neither they nor I pretend to understand whether this is a psychological thing(some sort of 'people desire a feeling of control over their life and environment, action enhances that feeling, just like futily honking in gridlock traffic does, psychobabble, yadda-yadda') or whether it is a rational response to irrationally applied standards for evaluating CVs(as in the sciences, where a study that obtains a negative result is way less sexy than one that obtains a positive result, perhaps people who have big, bold, projects, even if doomed, on their resume have better future prospects than the ones with a boring history marked more by prudent avoidance than risky action); but apparently it's a fairly big bias.
I'd be interested to know how much of this sort of thing is action bias, how much is (misplaced) optimism, and how much comes down to a company being structured such that there is simply no option other than 'grow' or 'die', so even if everybody knows that 'cash out while the leaving is good, with a planned wind-down for the legacy customers' is the right move, it simply isn't on the table.
The complexity, and getting-sued risk, of tech patents are just so high that we need good, honest, businessmen like Intellectual Ventures to help us sort it all out for a small fee...
Seriously, you know that you are a morally bankrupt fucker when you are the one making that argument in your favor. Sure, in countries with shitty regulatory environments and 'rule of law' that exists largely as a punchline, you have a class of professional 'fixers', who know how to make things happen when provided with a suitable supply of grease for the correct palms, along with a supply of thugs to which you can pay for 'protection' to ensure that bad things don't happen. Those, though, at least have the decency to keep their mouths shut, and recognize that they are a symptom of a sick, dysfunctional system. IV has the audacity to argue that needing to hire a fixer and pay protection money for the privilege of selling a product without being nuked into a smoking crater is a good thing. Where is the osteosarcoma fairy when we need her?
But when questioned further, they'll all remember tons of warning signs that they ignored, because nobody gives a shit until somebody starts killing.
The problem with 'warning signs' is that(without a much larger and better constructed study population, which you would be unlikely to get) is selection bias: It is, indeed, very unlikely that somebody who goes in and shoots up the place acted 100% normally in the time leading up to doing so. However, without doing an equally-invasive-and-thorough investigation of a fairly large number of demographically similar non-shooters, how do you separate signal from noise?
Practically any instance of assholery, alienation, or general dark muttering looks like a 'warning sign' once you've gone and emptied a few magazines into cowering elementary school children; but that is diagnostically useless unless you have reason to suspect that a given behavior doesn't show up(or shows up orders of magnitude less frequently) in non spree shooters.
Eh, even frat bros have xboxes now. I'm pretty sure that you have to be able to type in 'HTML Machine Language' in order to be a computer genius these days... Taking the side panel off your case and just running it that way is also useful, like growing a beard if you want to be taken seriously in the humanities.
I don't have anything against VxWorks for embedded systems; but on a router a 'relatively flimsy network stack' is a teeny bit of a liability...
It was also my experience that(not necessarily through the fault of VxWorks per se; but because of the severe RAM cut on the VxWorks models) performance under loads like bittorrent(very high number of simultaneous connections, even if upstream bandwidth kept the overall throughput modest) tended to take a nasty dive earlier than on the models with better specs.
. . . he needs an official declaration that he was never guilty in the first place, and should never have been prosecuted.
I don't know if there is such an instrument; but what we really need for this situation(and a fair few others) is some equivalent of a 'pardon' that constitutes a formal repudiation of the law in question.
"Pardon" = "Guilty; but we'll let it slide because something something or other." What we need is a "Law XYZ was total bullshit, even when it was still on the books, and prosecutions for violation of it, however formally correct, are similarly unjust."
It's perfectly correct not to pardon Turing, there's no evidence that the conviction was procedurally or factually troubled(and selective pardoning of cool guilty people is, if anything, an offense to justice itself); but it is worth noting that the 'crime' he was convicted of never should have been a crime.
It's probably for the best that they are so lousy at predicting the future... Did you see the one for 2006 where they talked about integrating Lotus groupware with some horrible Second Life clone to produce some sort of dystopian 3d cubiclespace hell?
So, IBM's bold futurists predict that sensors and haptic feedback systems that already exist today will become better in 5 years, and some sort of vaguely-referenced-but-woven-through-all-the-predictions 'deep learning' algorithm that we'll lease from IBM will make something magic happen?
Jesus Golgotha-poledancing Christ, the future just isn't what it used to be...
I don't have a good answer for them(nor is it assured that there even is one.) My point was just that the "Acquire Linksys and gimp their stuff" strategy is only viable if there is some barrier to entry that prevents another Linksys from rising in the first one's place. If there are sufficient barriers to entry, buying a competitor and reconfiguring their product line to protect your market can work. If not, though, the best you can hope for is that you delayed the change you are worried about, by picking off the leader/most competent executor of the trend; and, at worst, you might actually be encouraging it, because now "Get bought by Cisco" looks like a plausible cash-out avenue for any VC thinking of backing a network device company...
In the very short term, it may well have actually worked. We'd need to have more specific numbers on Cisco's lowish end gear sales in that time period, vs the cost of acquiring Linksys, and the shifts in the fortunes of Linksys' competitors due to the acquisition. Beyond that term, though, it seems very likely that it could not stem the tide. Linksys may have been ahead of their game when Cisco purchased them; but the other players have been improving, and Cisco can't buy them all, or prevent others from rising up(or, if they did want to prevent them, they'd have to go directly to the source, the SoC spinners like Broadcomm, Aetheros, Marvell, and cripple the steady supply of competent-but-boring low-end router boards for random pacific rim OEMs to shove into boxes, and that would involve serious cash and possible antitrust concerns).
To go with your analogy, Microsoft does have an Android problem(even if Apple is walking away with most of the profits, Android is the one that saturates every mobile niche that Apple doesn't deign to touch and some that it does); but would that make buying, say, HTC, a good idea? Taking out one Android handset vendor might be enough to scuttle the launch of some particular device or set of devices; but there are a number of more or less interchangeable competitors who will fill the gap(especially if you try to cripple and/or raise the price of HTC products in order to reconfigure the mobile market).
I agree with you that Cisco is right to be concerned about companies nibbling in from the low end, I just don't think that they bring anything to the table to solve that problem. The low end doesn't care about compatibility with Cisco's high end configuration mechanisms and features(at best, they might want them but not be willing to pay, at worst, they are actively afraid of them); but Cisco also has minimal-to-zero capability in delivering any low-end products that might be able to synergize with Cisco network hardware in a useful way. The Flip(also killed) might have increased demand for bandwidth in a vague sense; but that's an ISP bottleneck, not something that would trouble any consumer router except the nastiest 802.11b devices(indeed, notably, the 'Flip Share TV' wireless media extender/streamer specifically didn't run on top of a user-visible IP network at all, it used a proprietary dongle on the host PC to drive the media player box). Their video-conferencing stuff, outside of the 'worth-more-than-your-car' range, is similarly a non-event, and they've never made a compelling case that (again, beyond driving a vague demand for better internet connections) you would somehow be better off with a Cisco router. Their 'Media Hub' product was similarly mediocre compared to every other cheapie NAS on the market, and similarly offered no obvious advantage to Cisco/Linksys users compared to users of other network gear. They just don't seem to have anything to offer on the low end.
Honestly, unless they have a markedly better plan, they might well be best off to just milk the hell out of the high end for as long as they can and then quit and go sit on their pile of money.
I'm sure it's undergone minor revision changes since then, But I bet the bulk of the hardware and software remains unchanged since 2003.
Just a note, for the reference of anybody reading this: The WRT-54/GL is very similar to the wildly popular classic WRT-54G that put the 'WRT' in 'OpenWRT' and 'DD-WRT'. However, the WRT-54G(non L) has gone through something like 5 revisions, and the later ones are more or less entirely different animals in the same box. Less flash, less RAM, vxworks(yeah, like hell it works) based firmware, poor compatibility with anything but the most stripped down 3rd-party firmwares. In fact, the 'L' model was actually a re-release of the older revision designed to cater to the enthusiasts who had been alienated by the later revisions of the 54G.
If you go shopping, just be sure you know which is which. I don't know how the 54GL holds up against the newer models from non-linksys sources; but anything being sold as a WRT-54G(unless it specifically specifies one of the earlier, better revision numbers) is shit and probably not worth the money.
I'm personally inclined to wonder if the Cisco Linksys acquisition was really an optimistic attempt to kneecap a potential competitor(Linksys certainly didn't have the really classy stuff, like redundant PSUs and such, nor did it have ios-equivalent commands to make your enterprise admins happy; but the capabilities of a relatively feeble ARM/MIPS SoC running linux were getting uncomfortably close to those of Cisco's ~$500-ish branch-office routers, and Linksys was putting out some definitely-adequate-for-the-money not-wholly-unmanaged rack switches and things) that ended up underestimating how quickly the utter crap segment would move toward adequacy.
Before the market's maturation, there was some genuine shit being sold as consumer network gear(and there still is, if you get unlucky, though it's harder to feel cheated when your $15 allegedly-wireless-N router flakes out after 6 months than it was back when your $80-$100 allegedly-wireless-B router flakes out after 6 months of only actually connecting to your laptop half the time); but the basic strategy of shoving a modestly powerful SoC from one of the major wireless vendors onto a more-or-less reference design PCB and equipping it either with Linux(on the high end) or VXworks(for the real cheap seats) is something that even the nastiest bottom feeders can usually get mostly right. The firmware will usually be terrible; but the nasty bottom feeders also have no real incentive to lock out 3rd-party firmware, which has gotten pretty decent.
If the consumer/SOHO networking market still looked like it did when Linksys was purchased, the buy might actually have been a good idea: assimilate the company that was getting a little uppity in terms of feature sets for the money, bump the prices on their classier gear, nerf the features on their lower end stuff, and call it a day. Trouble is, outside of the extremely low end(where margins are so tight that you can't even be sure that the wall-wart won't set your house on fire), shoving SoCs in plastic boxes is totally commodified and firmware(while each vendor seems to have a perverse desire to roll their own shitty version, rather than just slapping a lightly branded OpenWRT build on it) has gotten better over time, and still has a marginal cost of $0 to ship the nicest and most featureful build you have available to you. That's just not a place where Cisco can win: Cisco has a high-margin/lots of features market to protect, so they do incur a cost if they start shipping their good firmware on cheap hardware; but 'tenda' or 'trendnet' or any other "Who the hell are they?" outfit has nothing to lose and everything to gain if their firmware is as good as it can possibly be. They don't necessarily have the cash to actually write good firmware, and that firmware won't be running on good hardware; but even bad hardware can be pretty good, and the overall quality of embedded linuxes has gotten significantly better.