I wouldn't be too smug, my iPhone 6+ had some troubles with its lightning socket after a couple of years. I got temporary relief by detail-cleaning the socket, but the problems always came back.
I'm kind of glad for wireless charging, I can at least lose a couple of insertion cycles a day by charging on a pad vs. a cable.
I think the general design of the lightning socket/cable is better due to the lack of a tongue in the socket, but in theory isn't the tongue somewhat safe from breakage because of the uniform plug shape and the fact that you basically can't put a misaligned plug into it?
There are so many misfeatures in the Win 8.1 and Win 10 user interface, I wish I could read transcripts of the highly paid experts at MS who discuss them (or don't..). It seems beyond imaginable that actual UI experts or human factors experts actually have a say, or get more than a token comment in over marketing and strategy people who want to push a long-term strategy.
Right now my favorite is the burying/obfuscation of the "old" control panels for the Win 10 settings screens. You used to be able to get to them by right-clicking the start menu, but now you have to search for them. Some Win10 settings actually pop up old control panel interfaces.
I don't doubt MS has some kind of user testing data to validate their decisions, but I can't help but wonder how much selection bias is built into their decisions -- cherrypicking testers who think think will validate their decisions vs. actual random samplings of existing users.
I think MS might actually just be gambling hard on some futurism, assuming they have existing users so locked in it doesn't matter what changes they make, and focusing all their UI changes on people 16-22 because they represent the future.
I think thatâ(TM)s a dangerous arrogance. Whatever wrongs are ascribed to the boomer generation, most older boomers still have wisdom about many things. Itâ(TM)s a natural process every generation has possessed, regardless of their generationâ(TM)s historical wrongs. Humans that have lived 50-60+ years have seen and experienced a lot.
I'm 51 and I do feel less capable in some ways than when I was 31. Lack of enthusiasm, more external interests and distractions, greater health infirmities. Which doesn't mean I'm incapable, on balance my experience and acquired wisdom balances out my constitutional inability to work 24 hours in a row -- I can't do it, but I don't need to.
Depending on your frame of reference, I'm either less capable because I don't do marathon all-nighters or I'm more capable because I don't need to.
I think the larger problem is that what happened traditionally is that the surviving elders became the pool of knowledge and wisdom. Their contribution wasn't hunting down the dangerous game, their contribution was knowing *where* and *how* to chase it down.
Modern capitalists, however, expect *both* and seem to value the sacrificial warrior more than the wide elder.
It's hardly a surprise. In the US we're filled with "financial planners" and other similar people who pitch themselves as helping improve your financial life, when in fact they aren't even really obligated to make their clients fiduciary interests primary. They're nothing more than glorified stock salesmen, pushing high-load, low-yield branded mutual funds, crappy stocks and high-activity trading which they benefit from.
The sales pitch, even when its half-informative, is often a deceptive lure. Guy with shitty retirement planning breaks down and goes to a financial planner. Is told he's way behind the curve. Guy says "what about a no load mutual fund", and the planner is like "you could do that, but these days they only return 3% and based on my magic spreadsheet you need a more aggressive return, like my portfolio of targeted mutual funds and some individual company stocks where you can get that 10% yield you need to catch up".
So the guy buys into shitty funds and stocks that mostly likely just help the financial planner retire.
Financial planning education is non-existent in schools, fixing that would help. It would also help to crack down fucking hard on "financial planning" and require SIMPLE, BOLD PRINT, PLAIN ENGLISH, UP FRONT disclosures that planners are in the business of selling products, not in caring about your outcome. Or better yet, REQUIRE that financial planners (or whatever label you want to invent) MUST PLACE THEIR CLIENTS FIDUCIARY INTERESTS AHEAD OF THEIR OWN. If we had financial services that were about client interests and not just pushing shitty investments it would help everyone.
Brokers and salesman can continue their line of chicanery and fraud, but at least there would be a legitimate category of financial planners people could trust.
Every infectious disease, unless it can be wiped out like smallpox, will have stubborn reservoirs, like iimpoverished populations, where no amount of mainstream public health awareness will help. It's a 99%/1% situation, where eliminating the last 1% literally takes 99% of the larger cost, effort and time.
This isn't to say that the CDC should close its doors, even low level but persistent work on these kinds of diseases is worthwhile, especially if they could spike up.
But it's not 1925 anymore where major pathogenic diseases like cholera, malaria, smallpox, typhus were a real public health hazard and where public health initiatives provided significant and valuable increases in public health.
It's more like the fight against smoking. At least where I live, the major public health initiatives against smoking have cut smoking so drastically it's almost a non-problem in terms of general public health. With the main work completed, now anti-smoking activists are bearing down on the stubborn reservoirs with increasingly onerous and paternalistic social engineering -- like banning menthols. Why ban menthols? Smoking rates remain stubbornly high among poor black people and they like menthols more than white people, and its a way of social engineering their goal among a population that won't listen to their public health message.
The CDC is the same way -- the big jobs are done for the most part, and now they're looking for new ways to define existing problems as "public health" issues so that they can pursue "solutions" and remain relevant. If the other issues (new polio outbreaks, MRSA, etc) are such big problems, why is the CDC devoting manpower and money to non-pathogenic social "diseases" like gun violence? Either there's not much they can do about the existing pathogenic problems or they're just looking for relevance.
The best part about the rulebook strike is that you don't need to strike or be a union member to get mileage out of it.
We had a come-to-Jesus meeting about slow time entry (our system sucked, was cumbersome, and management's general expectation was that time entry should be done on your own time).
During the meeting where we vented at some of the dumb misfeatures of time entry that required multiple steps due to bad field interactions, it was suggested that total time mattered, but start/stop fields didn't need to be accurate. Of course I raised my hand and asked why we collected them at all, and what other fields we collected data on were ultimately irrelevant.
Of course my manager was tongue-tied, trying to explain how none of it was really irrelevant but that we should consider some of it irrelevant because it got in the way of the main goal, collecting time for billing.
I love to exploit these situations from time to time, following their rules to the T until they tell me to stop following their rules because its getting in the way. You keep enough of these emails and suddenly no rules matter because it becomes apparent that they're as interested in convenience as anybody.
Any sufficiently involved management system will be corrupted by managers to further their own narrow goals, which are usually personal enrichment and petty power.
It seems more likely when the management system is designed to "help" a class of employee be better. It provides great propaganda cover, early adopters may get the real thing and become evangelists for the system even after it has been turned into a system of oppression, limiting new and lower level employees from even complaining since the "rock stars" all promote it.
It would seem to have many parallels to utopian political systems. Sounds great on paper and the party pushes its loyalists' opinion, but at the end of the day it gets turned into a means of control and a way to maintain power by the elite.
So the CDC is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
There's very little serious infectious disease in the US, and those diseases that remain are low-level and stubborn to eliminate. They can chase short-term outbreaks (E. Coli and other food-borne pathogens) and predict potential apocalypse from new pandemics, but other than that they're forced to redefine non-pathogenic problems as "public health crises" and suggest social engineering solutions.
Number portability means there is a database made available to telcos so they know where to route calls. "It's hard" was their principal objection to number portability, they wanted the simpler and less intensive route maps where telcos owned entire exchanges and could route calls with less effort and maintenance.
But now that we have number portability, telcos should be able to use that same database to determine if calling party identification actually matches the origin of the call. Businesses with PBXs and DID blocks should already be in this, as should the numbers associated with their trunks.
Bottom line is that they just don't want to, probably because of money changing hands someplace.
Either they don't want to annoy a service provider client with a huge set of trunks who could pretty easily find some other carrier to provide them with trunks or they're getting per-termination fees from the inbound source and don't want to disrupt them.
It will suffer from the same "range anxiety" that electric cars do.
Objectively, range anxiety is kind of bogus for 85% of the driving people do but because some small number of trips don't factor into the car's range, people say electric cars aren't good enough.
Substitute "performance" for "range" and you have the ARM laptop problem. For a lot of people it would be fine but because some people will need to run x86 apps and they will run slow, many people will assume its not as useful and stick with x86 laptops.
In the main, developers seem unable/unwilling to provide parallel support for cross-architecture applications and unless the market decides to shift to ARM you wind up with this fallback to x86.
I mostly meant it to be snarky, but I think there's some kind of weird wisdom there.
I mean, it's kind of a mixed metaphor. The stone age mostly refers to a historical epoch, not just the absence of a non-stone technology. But at the same time, we didn't stop using stone as a technology once the historical epoch shifted to metals like bronze and then iron.
Some future historian will probably identify current time as the switch from the oil age to the electricity age, since electricity dominates nearly all energy consumption, and oil has a diminishing direct use as an energy source. But it doesn't mean that a dense hydrocarbon like oil doesn't and won't have continued use, either as a basis for other products like plastics or some kind of energy source, just like the development of bronze and iron didn't stop people from continuing to use stone for buildings or other purposes.
How can you pause and finish up the standards implementation when someone is juuuusssttt about to release a newer, better standard? Better giddyup and release the next iteration of the standard, don't finish the current one.
I think most of the problem is the 90/10 rule. The last 10% takes 90% of the time and it's boring and uninteresting work that involves fixing bugs and making the hard to work bits work right.
It's not nearly as interesting as dreaming about a new, better standard that's broader, more all-encompassing and just better. Might as well announce it to everybody and get people interested in that and hopefully kill off that bad, old standard -- I mean, they never finished it, did they?
I doubt this will happen because these brands want to keep themselves unique, but mostly because the cost of separate protocols is about zero due to the power of head unit computing and how the difference is mostly in software.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple & Android supplied most of the software that makes it work to standards set by automakers, further reducing the cost of supporting both platforms.
In theory, the major automakers (US, Japanese, German) could have banded together under some engineering standard banner and defined some kind of common head unit integration standard and said it would be the only one they would support, take it or leave it.
But I think carmakers were willing to cater to either Apple or Android or both because they saw that catering to these audiences individually was a compelling marketing tool. Luxury aspirational brands want to say "we are Apple friendly" because it gives them a competitive edge and creates a more personal appeal.
It's a real irritant that there's not at least a shortcut to the bluetooth portion of settings to easily start dealing with which bluetooth devices are connected.
Bluetooth is just annoying enough that I find myself constantly fucking around to see if the device I want to use has auto-reconnected, but this is less an Apple problem than the rolling trainwreck of bluetooth.
Do app developers have to pay Apple to gain access to CarPlay?
I'm guessing that it's not merely a question of making your app meet CarPlay UI standards and meeting some "distraction free" criteria.
Or is it one of those cases where Apple has some weird opaque standard tied to internal strategies and you never have any way of knowing how to get CarPlay enabled?
All of these big tech companies have VAST amounts of cash available to them. They could easily buy most companies that present a threat to them or buy their way into entirely new industries if they wanted. Apple literally has enough cash to buy both Ford and GM and Fiat Chrysler at their current market capitalization. Microsoft and Alphabet/Google and to a lesser degree Facebook are similarly comfortable.
I think there needs to be some kind of disincentive for corporations to sit on very large piles of cash and/or short term investments. I don't know what the "right" number is, probably some ratio tied to business size and revenue, but beyond the magic number maybe they should face taxes that makes even holding treasuries a net negative interest rate.
IMHO, corporations should either be handing the money back to investors as dividends or using to invest in new products or production. If they're allowed to hoard cash, it takes that money basically out of the productive economy and lets them squash potential competitors.
When the only practical exit strategy left to you is to be bought out by a Facebook, a Google, an Apple or a Microsoft, then the only strategy you have left as an entrepreneur is to figure out what will get you bought out
I've read this is exactly the problem that "innovation" faces now. "Innovators" no longer are really interested in solving interesting problems, the energy now goes into coming up with ideas that are interesting and nip enough at the margins of the heavyweights to get them to buy them out.
My guess is that most IT sales organizations have figured out that the "architect" is someone with serious influence over the actual solution, since (at least as I've been exposed to it) they are the ones that design the solution and do a lot of product selection.
The "engineer" is the one stuck gluing together all the pieces, but no longer has much, if any, influence over the actual product selection -- unless it's a good company with some kind of project completion feedback mechanism that lets the engineer rail on the shitty choices the architect made or at least dump a ream of change orders that went into getting it working onto a conference table so the solution lessons can be digested.
I honestly think there are a lot of people who are basically professional conference attendees. I'm surprised that many companies will put up with this, my exposure to it has been really negative -- and I mean that on a personality level. A lot of middle aged blowhards who try to pass themselves off as party hearty bros, when really there's a lot of pathetic divorcees or soon to be divorcees.
This seems kind unsurprising, there have been plenty of stories about how part of Erdogan's power base is construction companies owned by cronies who get a ton of government contracts. I think part of the whole dictatorship toolkit is crony capitalism, make sure your loyalists hold control over at least key economic sectors if not all of them.
In Turkey specifically, making sure your loyalists control the taxi market makes sense on several levels. One, I'd bet a lot of drivers are part of Erdogan's core demographic -- low income, more traditionally minded religiously. Two, a well-controlled taxi system provides control over transportation -- who's driving, who's being driven, etc. Three, Uber is a western company and will suck some of the profits out of Turkey, something that Erdogan won't want when his economy does relatively poorly, and four, it allows for Erdogan's cronies to reap the profits of a controlled sector.
I think that's the problem generally, though. Most conferences that were once technology oriented have been taken over by business and marketing people who realize it's one more avenue to press their strategic message.
I'm sure there still are conferences that still push the hands-on, more vendor-neutral technology. But aren't these also a lot of BS? There may be side panels or something that can be interesting, but I also find them to full of people I swear are just professional conference attendees, blowhards and schwag collectors.
I sometimes wonder if I'd just be better off checking into a hotel room for 3 days with a flash drive full of new ISOs and a stack of manuals and just using the relative isolation to have a crash course in something new.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be too smug, my iPhone 6+ had some troubles with its lightning socket after a couple of years. I got temporary relief by detail-cleaning the socket, but the problems always came back.
I'm kind of glad for wireless charging, I can at least lose a couple of insertion cycles a day by charging on a pad vs. a cable.
I think the general design of the lightning socket/cable is better due to the lack of a tongue in the socket, but in theory isn't the tongue somewhat safe from breakage because of the uniform plug shape and the fact that you basically can't put a misaligned plug into it?
There are so many misfeatures in the Win 8.1 and Win 10 user interface, I wish I could read transcripts of the highly paid experts at MS who discuss them (or don't..). It seems beyond imaginable that actual UI experts or human factors experts actually have a say, or get more than a token comment in over marketing and strategy people who want to push a long-term strategy.
Right now my favorite is the burying/obfuscation of the "old" control panels for the Win 10 settings screens. You used to be able to get to them by right-clicking the start menu, but now you have to search for them. Some Win10 settings actually pop up old control panel interfaces.
I don't doubt MS has some kind of user testing data to validate their decisions, but I can't help but wonder how much selection bias is built into their decisions -- cherrypicking testers who think think will validate their decisions vs. actual random samplings of existing users.
I think MS might actually just be gambling hard on some futurism, assuming they have existing users so locked in it doesn't matter what changes they make, and focusing all their UI changes on people 16-22 because they represent the future.
I think thatâ(TM)s a dangerous arrogance. Whatever wrongs are ascribed to the boomer generation, most older boomers still have wisdom about many things. Itâ(TM)s a natural process every generation has possessed, regardless of their generationâ(TM)s historical wrongs. Humans that have lived 50-60+ years have seen and experienced a lot.
You're both right.
I'm 51 and I do feel less capable in some ways than when I was 31. Lack of enthusiasm, more external interests and distractions, greater health infirmities. Which doesn't mean I'm incapable, on balance my experience and acquired wisdom balances out my constitutional inability to work 24 hours in a row -- I can't do it, but I don't need to.
Depending on your frame of reference, I'm either less capable because I don't do marathon all-nighters or I'm more capable because I don't need to.
I think the larger problem is that what happened traditionally is that the surviving elders became the pool of knowledge and wisdom. Their contribution wasn't hunting down the dangerous game, their contribution was knowing *where* and *how* to chase it down.
Modern capitalists, however, expect *both* and seem to value the sacrificial warrior more than the wide elder.
It's hardly a surprise. In the US we're filled with "financial planners" and other similar people who pitch themselves as helping improve your financial life, when in fact they aren't even really obligated to make their clients fiduciary interests primary. They're nothing more than glorified stock salesmen, pushing high-load, low-yield branded mutual funds, crappy stocks and high-activity trading which they benefit from.
The sales pitch, even when its half-informative, is often a deceptive lure. Guy with shitty retirement planning breaks down and goes to a financial planner. Is told he's way behind the curve. Guy says "what about a no load mutual fund", and the planner is like "you could do that, but these days they only return 3% and based on my magic spreadsheet you need a more aggressive return, like my portfolio of targeted mutual funds and some individual company stocks where you can get that 10% yield you need to catch up".
So the guy buys into shitty funds and stocks that mostly likely just help the financial planner retire.
Financial planning education is non-existent in schools, fixing that would help. It would also help to crack down fucking hard on "financial planning" and require SIMPLE, BOLD PRINT, PLAIN ENGLISH, UP FRONT disclosures that planners are in the business of selling products, not in caring about your outcome. Or better yet, REQUIRE that financial planners (or whatever label you want to invent) MUST PLACE THEIR CLIENTS FIDUCIARY INTERESTS AHEAD OF THEIR OWN. If we had financial services that were about client interests and not just pushing shitty investments it would help everyone.
Brokers and salesman can continue their line of chicanery and fraud, but at least there would be a legitimate category of financial planners people could trust.
Every infectious disease, unless it can be wiped out like smallpox, will have stubborn reservoirs, like iimpoverished populations, where no amount of mainstream public health awareness will help. It's a 99%/1% situation, where eliminating the last 1% literally takes 99% of the larger cost, effort and time.
This isn't to say that the CDC should close its doors, even low level but persistent work on these kinds of diseases is worthwhile, especially if they could spike up.
But it's not 1925 anymore where major pathogenic diseases like cholera, malaria, smallpox, typhus were a real public health hazard and where public health initiatives provided significant and valuable increases in public health.
It's more like the fight against smoking. At least where I live, the major public health initiatives against smoking have cut smoking so drastically it's almost a non-problem in terms of general public health. With the main work completed, now anti-smoking activists are bearing down on the stubborn reservoirs with increasingly onerous and paternalistic social engineering -- like banning menthols. Why ban menthols? Smoking rates remain stubbornly high among poor black people and they like menthols more than white people, and its a way of social engineering their goal among a population that won't listen to their public health message.
The CDC is the same way -- the big jobs are done for the most part, and now they're looking for new ways to define existing problems as "public health" issues so that they can pursue "solutions" and remain relevant. If the other issues (new polio outbreaks, MRSA, etc) are such big problems, why is the CDC devoting manpower and money to non-pathogenic social "diseases" like gun violence? Either there's not much they can do about the existing pathogenic problems or they're just looking for relevance.
The best part about the rulebook strike is that you don't need to strike or be a union member to get mileage out of it.
We had a come-to-Jesus meeting about slow time entry (our system sucked, was cumbersome, and management's general expectation was that time entry should be done on your own time).
During the meeting where we vented at some of the dumb misfeatures of time entry that required multiple steps due to bad field interactions, it was suggested that total time mattered, but start/stop fields didn't need to be accurate. Of course I raised my hand and asked why we collected them at all, and what other fields we collected data on were ultimately irrelevant.
Of course my manager was tongue-tied, trying to explain how none of it was really irrelevant but that we should consider some of it irrelevant because it got in the way of the main goal, collecting time for billing.
I love to exploit these situations from time to time, following their rules to the T until they tell me to stop following their rules because its getting in the way. You keep enough of these emails and suddenly no rules matter because it becomes apparent that they're as interested in convenience as anybody.
Any sufficiently involved management system will be corrupted by managers to further their own narrow goals, which are usually personal enrichment and petty power.
It seems more likely when the management system is designed to "help" a class of employee be better. It provides great propaganda cover, early adopters may get the real thing and become evangelists for the system even after it has been turned into a system of oppression, limiting new and lower level employees from even complaining since the "rock stars" all promote it.
It would seem to have many parallels to utopian political systems. Sounds great on paper and the party pushes its loyalists' opinion, but at the end of the day it gets turned into a means of control and a way to maintain power by the elite.
Kids and wife.
Got to know what the former is up to, can't let the latter sneak up on me.
We've had the power company AC controller for years and I have never noticed a loss of cooling in the house, even during the day.
I think they're really easy to bypass from what I can tell, and I don't think the power company has any clue.
So the CDC is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
There's very little serious infectious disease in the US, and those diseases that remain are low-level and stubborn to eliminate. They can chase short-term outbreaks (E. Coli and other food-borne pathogens) and predict potential apocalypse from new pandemics, but other than that they're forced to redefine non-pathogenic problems as "public health crises" and suggest social engineering solutions.
Number portability means there is a database made available to telcos so they know where to route calls. "It's hard" was their principal objection to number portability, they wanted the simpler and less intensive route maps where telcos owned entire exchanges and could route calls with less effort and maintenance.
But now that we have number portability, telcos should be able to use that same database to determine if calling party identification actually matches the origin of the call. Businesses with PBXs and DID blocks should already be in this, as should the numbers associated with their trunks.
Bottom line is that they just don't want to, probably because of money changing hands someplace.
Either they don't want to annoy a service provider client with a huge set of trunks who could pretty easily find some other carrier to provide them with trunks or they're getting per-termination fees from the inbound source and don't want to disrupt them.
It will suffer from the same "range anxiety" that electric cars do.
Objectively, range anxiety is kind of bogus for 85% of the driving people do but because some small number of trips don't factor into the car's range, people say electric cars aren't good enough.
Substitute "performance" for "range" and you have the ARM laptop problem. For a lot of people it would be fine but because some people will need to run x86 apps and they will run slow, many people will assume its not as useful and stick with x86 laptops.
In the main, developers seem unable/unwilling to provide parallel support for cross-architecture applications and unless the market decides to shift to ARM you wind up with this fallback to x86.
I mostly meant it to be snarky, but I think there's some kind of weird wisdom there.
I mean, it's kind of a mixed metaphor. The stone age mostly refers to a historical epoch, not just the absence of a non-stone technology. But at the same time, we didn't stop using stone as a technology once the historical epoch shifted to metals like bronze and then iron.
Some future historian will probably identify current time as the switch from the oil age to the electricity age, since electricity dominates nearly all energy consumption, and oil has a diminishing direct use as an energy source. But it doesn't mean that a dense hydrocarbon like oil doesn't and won't have continued use, either as a basis for other products like plastics or some kind of energy source, just like the development of bronze and iron didn't stop people from continuing to use stone for buildings or other purposes.
How can you pause and finish up the standards implementation when someone is juuuusssttt about to release a newer, better standard? Better giddyup and release the next iteration of the standard, don't finish the current one.
I think most of the problem is the 90/10 rule. The last 10% takes 90% of the time and it's boring and uninteresting work that involves fixing bugs and making the hard to work bits work right.
It's not nearly as interesting as dreaming about a new, better standard that's broader, more all-encompassing and just better. Might as well announce it to everybody and get people interested in that and hopefully kill off that bad, old standard -- I mean, they never finished it, did they?
I doubt this will happen because these brands want to keep themselves unique, but mostly because the cost of separate protocols is about zero due to the power of head unit computing and how the difference is mostly in software.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple & Android supplied most of the software that makes it work to standards set by automakers, further reducing the cost of supporting both platforms.
In theory, the major automakers (US, Japanese, German) could have banded together under some engineering standard banner and defined some kind of common head unit integration standard and said it would be the only one they would support, take it or leave it.
But I think carmakers were willing to cater to either Apple or Android or both because they saw that catering to these audiences individually was a compelling marketing tool. Luxury aspirational brands want to say "we are Apple friendly" because it gives them a competitive edge and creates a more personal appeal.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, the oil age won't end because we run out of oil.
Considering how retarded Siri can be, that's a really drag on development.
I mean pretty much 100% of cars with in-dash displays rely on touch screen touch interaction or at least its the preferred method.
I guess I could see serious limits on touch interaction (limited buttons, no text input, etc) but 100% voice isn't appealing to me as a user, either.
It's a real irritant that there's not at least a shortcut to the bluetooth portion of settings to easily start dealing with which bluetooth devices are connected.
Bluetooth is just annoying enough that I find myself constantly fucking around to see if the device I want to use has auto-reconnected, but this is less an Apple problem than the rolling trainwreck of bluetooth.
Do app developers have to pay Apple to gain access to CarPlay?
I'm guessing that it's not merely a question of making your app meet CarPlay UI standards and meeting some "distraction free" criteria.
Or is it one of those cases where Apple has some weird opaque standard tied to internal strategies and you never have any way of knowing how to get CarPlay enabled?
All of these big tech companies have VAST amounts of cash available to them. They could easily buy most companies that present a threat to them or buy their way into entirely new industries if they wanted. Apple literally has enough cash to buy both Ford and GM and Fiat Chrysler at their current market capitalization. Microsoft and Alphabet/Google and to a lesser degree Facebook are similarly comfortable.
I think there needs to be some kind of disincentive for corporations to sit on very large piles of cash and/or short term investments. I don't know what the "right" number is, probably some ratio tied to business size and revenue, but beyond the magic number maybe they should face taxes that makes even holding treasuries a net negative interest rate.
IMHO, corporations should either be handing the money back to investors as dividends or using to invest in new products or production. If they're allowed to hoard cash, it takes that money basically out of the productive economy and lets them squash potential competitors.
When the only practical exit strategy left to you is to be bought out by a Facebook, a Google, an Apple or a Microsoft, then the only strategy you have left as an entrepreneur is to figure out what will get you bought out
I've read this is exactly the problem that "innovation" faces now. "Innovators" no longer are really interested in solving interesting problems, the energy now goes into coming up with ideas that are interesting and nip enough at the margins of the heavyweights to get them to buy them out.
My guess is that most IT sales organizations have figured out that the "architect" is someone with serious influence over the actual solution, since (at least as I've been exposed to it) they are the ones that design the solution and do a lot of product selection.
The "engineer" is the one stuck gluing together all the pieces, but no longer has much, if any, influence over the actual product selection -- unless it's a good company with some kind of project completion feedback mechanism that lets the engineer rail on the shitty choices the architect made or at least dump a ream of change orders that went into getting it working onto a conference table so the solution lessons can be digested.
I honestly think there are a lot of people who are basically professional conference attendees. I'm surprised that many companies will put up with this, my exposure to it has been really negative -- and I mean that on a personality level. A lot of middle aged blowhards who try to pass themselves off as party hearty bros, when really there's a lot of pathetic divorcees or soon to be divorcees.
This seems kind unsurprising, there have been plenty of stories about how part of Erdogan's power base is construction companies owned by cronies who get a ton of government contracts. I think part of the whole dictatorship toolkit is crony capitalism, make sure your loyalists hold control over at least key economic sectors if not all of them.
In Turkey specifically, making sure your loyalists control the taxi market makes sense on several levels. One, I'd bet a lot of drivers are part of Erdogan's core demographic -- low income, more traditionally minded religiously. Two, a well-controlled taxi system provides control over transportation -- who's driving, who's being driven, etc. Three, Uber is a western company and will suck some of the profits out of Turkey, something that Erdogan won't want when his economy does relatively poorly, and four, it allows for Erdogan's cronies to reap the profits of a controlled sector.
I think that's the problem generally, though. Most conferences that were once technology oriented have been taken over by business and marketing people who realize it's one more avenue to press their strategic message.
I'm sure there still are conferences that still push the hands-on, more vendor-neutral technology. But aren't these also a lot of BS? There may be side panels or something that can be interesting, but I also find them to full of people I swear are just professional conference attendees, blowhards and schwag collectors.
I sometimes wonder if I'd just be better off checking into a hotel room for 3 days with a flash drive full of new ISOs and a stack of manuals and just using the relative isolation to have a crash course in something new.