Sorry, the "raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction" is something you made up.
Actually just a bit over a month ago John Sculley, CEO of Apple back then commented on this during an interview. He said that was his strategy at the time. Of course as an apple fanboi you rather believe otherwise, so don't let the facts get on the way of your delusions.
And guess what: the price of the Mac hasn't changed much at all in that period of time!
About a year ago, Steve Jobs said that part of his strategy when he came back had been to take Mac's price down from premium to regular.
I mean to say the smaller cars are awkwardly tight and have poor visibility due to having to put things like A pillars in places that obscure vision to improve driver safety (on account of vehicle size).
Well designed cars have no pillars in the places where you need to see. It is all about design. In particular, Detroit is infamous for not caring about visibility, but again size has nothing to do with it. For example, I had better visibility on a mid 90s Honda Civic than a much larger Grand Am (not to speak of the mid-2000 Civic redesign which had even better visibility).
On the other hand, the Toyota FJ Cruise and the Honda Element have much less visibility than a Honda Accord. Again pillars on line of sight is about design not size.
To play Devil's Advocate, there is a rational reason for doing so.
I think you give the "bigger-is-safer" brainwashed drivers out there too much credit. I drive a sedan and a SUV and I can tell that the visibility thing is mostly a myth: you can't see past a minivan on either. This might have been true at some point,when big cars were few and far between but in this day and age SUVs give very little actual increased visibility. What people think is increased visibility really only means being able to stare down the normal size sedan right next to you.
As well, there are common traffic situations where visibility doesn't really help yet size hurts. Say a car suddenly cuts into your lane. You either swerve and rollover, or step on the breaks, and guess what, because of your increased mass you cannot stop in time and run into the car in front of you. This is yet another way in which driving a larger car increases the chances of injury.
The safest car is neither the biggest nor the smallest. It's one in which the engineers right-sized the brakes to the mass of the car, given it a responsive car suspension (hint: most large SUV were built on pickup-truck platforms), has good factory installed tires (ford explorer any one?), put a proper cage around the passenger compartment and don't burst into flames upon impact.
The beancounters estimate the profit of entering new markets before a decision to do so gets made. In many cases, it isn't worth it for those companies.
Right, because the beancounters have proven so adept at estimating the size of markets created by new technologies. They created Blue-Ray as streaming shows was becoming the norm. They raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction. They refused a simple licensing scheme until their CD sales were at the brink of collapse, only to agree to a manque solution of expensive quality-crippled iTunes. They responded to the digital camera threat with a format that was more expensive than the previous emulsion film.
It isn't about trading with the most number of people, it is about maximizing profit.
If only that were true. It is about not getting it.
The upgrade is to fix UI issues. How bad is the UI? I rented a Ford Focus a month ago and could not figure out how to switch the radio station to a non-programmed location!!
The screen gave you no indication and none of the likely combinations worked, and I'm a techie who loves gadgets, CLI, etc.
I can only wonder what would the average customer experience be like.
You could give equal budgets to all schools independent of where are they located, for example. We don't and that is one way we make society systemically racist.
No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation.
This is the kind of things that only someone who has never done natural sciences research can say. Progress is made by following half hunches and "A implies B, B is true, then maybe A is true" guesses. Of course then you need to establish proper controls and properly determine that A is true.
Even then once you run your experiment turns out that A is true only 60% of the time, but given the computed noise rates of the experiment, this suggests that in fact A is true 100% of the time and A becomes true even though it held only 60% of the time.
Science is only as clean cut as you suggest in your post t in simplified high-school descriptions. In fact, if you have enough A implies B, A implies C, A implies D statements with all of B, C, D, etc holding, scientists will conclude A and accept it as true, even though it has not yet been proven.
I'll use an analogy to protect the guilty, but at a certain company, I was interviewing for, shall we say, a test pilot position and they asked me how would I go about having people board the plane.
This was so mind bogglingly unrelated that I checked out of the interview process right then and there.
Puzzles work both ways. A good relevant one can help filter an unsuitable candidate. An irrelevant puzzle helps filter unsuitable companies. The division I was supposed to join went on to be disbanded about a year after that.
TFA mentions this: "Broad, conceptual questions are fine, but if you get specific, make sure that what you're asking actually applies to the position on offer."
"For example, if you're mostly a Java shop [...] don't give candidates a problem in Lisp just to throw them a curveball. [...] If the questions focus on trivia rather than your actual work environment, your test will have as much real-world value as a pub quiz, and you'll end up excluding candidates essentially for no reason."
The bigger question is why the need to typecast people into groups. This is a unique American phenomenon, where kids replicate racist structures from society into a cast system that doesn't quite exist in any other country in the world.
I mean, in every school in the world there are popular girls, sports types, ethnic groups, studious people, alternative people, but they generally mingle and can be seen partaking in various activities. Sure a goth is likelier to hang out with another goth, but you can still talk to them.
Not in the American system, where groups are segregated and mingling is frown upon by all sides.
RIM is not the caliber of pre-Jobs Apple in the 90s (which was still quite innovative, just mismanaged).
I call BS. Apple in the 90s couldn't put out an incremental upgrade to their operating system, much less create anything innovative. It took two years with Steve at the helm before OS 9 came out. Not a single product released by Steve came from before his return as CEO.
Fire one or both of the current leadership, and we can talk turnaround.
Let's work with that premise for the sake of the argument. Then you agree, they are not too far gone: all they need to do is fire the CEOs and they are back in business, which supports my point. They still have time, but they better get moving.
How about Mintzberg argument that MBAs over emphasize the executive aspect of management (making decisions) and de-emphasize the motivational aspects of being a manager?
In real life managers rarely needs to make decisions on the spot. There is time to evaluate the situation, start pilot projects, obtain feedback from them and proceed along the most promising areas.
The redundancy serves an important purpose, and any signal the sender can put on the medium, a receiver can be trained to interpret.
Indeed it can. It was called AskJeeves and the sender is the one who chose not to waste time using a redundant protocol when communicating with a receiver who doesn't need it.
You don't want to have to spend 30 seconds digging through menus with your eyes on a screen to get directions, either.
Again you are giving a (valid) argument for a spoken command but this has nothing to do with the reason quoted in the article that I took exception with: "because we are used to talking to other humans".
Geeks hate it when normal people are able to do creative and status-earning things with computers, because it strikes at the heart of the modern geeks prestige.
"Wake me up in eight hours" is much easier and faster to say than setting up a timer
And "alarm. 8am" is even easier and it has nearly nothing to do with the way we communicate with humans (think "tea, earl gray, hot").
Look, I'm not saying there aren't times you would rather talk than type, what I'm saying is that its benefits and drawbacks have little to do with the fact that we use speech to talk to other humans.
Furthermore studies have shown that verbalizing one's need is an energy intensive process. So if I show you a menu with four options and ask you to either click on one or say it out loud, clicking is easier.
The article makes the common mistake of assuming that since language is optimized for human-to-human communication then it is a preferable form of communication between humans and other entities.
For starters human-to-human communication has a huge amount of redundancy. We repeat, reinforce, gesture with our hands and gesticulate with our faces to make sure our message is coming across. Mr. Spock wouldn't need all of that repetition, and neither does the computer.
You don't want to have to tell to the car "can you please apply the brakes now?" it is much easier, and yes, more natural to simply press a button or step on the brake pedal.
You don't believe me still? Armies all over the world establish a special communication protocol that purposely moves away from natural language communication with all its ambiguities to a command/control sparse language with just the right amount of redundancy to deal with noisy communications.
Captain: "Right full rudder, degree down angle." Pilot: "Right full rudder, degree down angle, sir"
I suggest you read "Managers not MBAs". Prof. Mintzberg makes the case much better than I ever could and he is a teacher in the respected McGill MBA program.
Right, because it couldn't possibly have happened that the mailman was late picking up the mail, thus postmarking it September 18 even though it was dropped before 5pm on the 17th.
We are also bad at estimating the odds when the random trial is not determined ahead of time. For example, let's say we are trying to prove/disprove that person A is stalking person B. Most people would accept as substantial proof a CCTV picture of A walking a few steps behind B.
However if we consider that A and B might know each other and hence move in similar circles, the chances that they ever appeared in a single frame are not that low. Still a bit of a coincidence, but not very surprising.
What would be proof is if we fixed three days ahead of time, when person B happened to be in places with full CCTV coverage, and then we came up with the same picture in one of those days. This coincidende is orders of magnitude less likely.
However most people confuse the two, and interpret the first one as if it was as unlikely as the second one.
I suspect the number of innocent in prison is quite a bit higher than we'd like to think.
I think the number that would actually be really high is innocent people on probation (perhaps after a short time served) who pleaded guilty just to avoid the grinding wheels of (in)justice.
The researchers found a single inconsistency in the FBI's case: the sample has too much tin. This alone is not enough to disprove it. There are alternative explanations.
As well, anecdotally, apparently even the most open and shut cases have at least one extremely odd occurrence that is hard to explain. And by open and shut cases I mean cases where the murderer took the police to where he had buried the bodies.
For example, the murderer drove in 10 minutes a distance than normally takes 25 minutes. Or a disgruntled former employee who lives nowhere the scene of the crime happened to walk by at the same time the guilty person was committing the murder.
On the other hand, it is also true that once policemen zero in on a potential target they have a really hard time retargeting their sights. This happened to Richard Jewell, who on the basis of the evidence should have been declared not a suspect much much earlier. But the FBI had become convinced he was guilty and kept on ignoring and rejecting exculpatory evidence.
"You claimed MBAs have no idea on how to deliver a quality product. I demonstrated otherwise."
You gave an example that they cover this in class, on paper. This is different than actually knowing something, To use an example, lawyers take ethic courses, but everybody knows its just for show, and as soon as they join the workforce they are expected to behave unethically, starting from charging you $2+ for every photocopy made by their secretary. How can that possibly be ethical?
"As I said, most software engineers are taught how to develop high quality reliable software. "
Thanks for bringing this up. This is a perfect example of what I'm trying to say. We really don't train Software engineers to produce quality software. We go through the motions, having them take some theoretical software engineering courses while at university. But most CS programs put out graduates that have never worked on a large project, that have never written anything bigger than a mock test suite, that have never had to maintain someone else's code. We put out code monkeys. Some of them become software engineers after they been long enough in the work force.
Slashdot Mirror
their prices were pretty much at the top end of what would be "acceptable" given their relatively low volumes,
If that were true, the Mac clones wouldn't have been as cheap as they were.
Apple's products are still considered to be overpriced
The iPhone perhaps and the iPod for sure; but Macs are no longer overpriced, but it will take a long time before people observe this.
The iPad is certainly not overpriced as proven by the fact that none of the competitors have been able to beat in price.
Exceptional products can be sold at a premium, during the SSA period Apple's products kept losing the exceptional status
Correct, which made them overpriced.
Sorry, the "raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction" is something you made up.
Actually just a bit over a month ago John Sculley, CEO of Apple back then commented on this during an interview. He said that was his strategy at the time. Of course as an apple fanboi you rather believe otherwise, so don't let the facts get on the way of your delusions.
And guess what: the price of the Mac hasn't changed much at all in that period of time!
About a year ago, Steve Jobs said that part of his strategy when he came back had been to take Mac's price down from premium to regular.
I mean to say the smaller cars are awkwardly tight and have poor visibility due to having to put things like A pillars in places that obscure vision to improve driver safety (on account of vehicle size).
Well designed cars have no pillars in the places where you need to see. It is all about design. In particular, Detroit is infamous for not caring about visibility, but again size has nothing to do with it. For example, I had better visibility on a mid 90s Honda Civic than a much larger Grand Am (not to speak of the mid-2000 Civic redesign which had even better visibility).
On the other hand, the Toyota FJ Cruise and the Honda Element have much less visibility than a Honda Accord. Again pillars on line of sight is about design not size.
To play Devil's Advocate, there is a rational reason for doing so.
I think you give the "bigger-is-safer" brainwashed drivers out there too much credit. I drive a sedan and a SUV and I can tell that the visibility thing is mostly a myth: you can't see past a minivan on either. This might have been true at some point,when big cars were few and far between but in this day and age SUVs give very little actual increased visibility. What people think is increased visibility really only means being able to stare down the normal size sedan right next to you.
As well, there are common traffic situations where visibility doesn't really help yet size hurts. Say a car suddenly cuts into your lane. You either swerve and rollover, or step on the breaks, and guess what, because of your increased mass you cannot stop in time and run into the car in front of you. This is yet another way in which driving a larger car increases the chances of injury.
The safest car is neither the biggest nor the smallest. It's one in which the engineers right-sized the brakes to the mass of the car, given it a responsive car suspension (hint: most large SUV were built on pickup-truck platforms), has good factory installed tires (ford explorer any one?), put a proper cage around the passenger compartment and don't burst into flames upon impact.
Where is size in all of that?
The beancounters estimate the profit of entering new markets before a decision to do so gets made. In many cases, it isn't worth it for those companies.
Right, because the beancounters have proven so adept at estimating the size of markets created by new technologies. They created Blue-Ray as streaming shows was becoming the norm. They raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction. They refused a simple licensing scheme until their CD sales were at the brink of collapse, only to agree to a manque solution of expensive quality-crippled iTunes. They responded to the digital camera threat with a format that was more expensive than the previous emulsion film.
It isn't about trading with the most number of people, it is about maximizing profit.
If only that were true. It is about not getting it.
it was his duty to protect his own family,
then why is he driving a car whose chances of rolling over are orders of magnitude higher than a regular sedan?
The upgrade is to fix UI issues. How bad is the UI? I rented a Ford Focus a month ago and could not figure out how to switch the radio station to a non-programmed location!!
The screen gave you no indication and none of the likely combinations worked, and I'm a techie who loves gadgets, CLI, etc.
I can only wonder what would the average customer experience be like.
You could give equal budgets to all schools independent of where are they located, for example. We don't and that is one way we make society systemically racist.
No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation.
This is the kind of things that only someone who has never done natural sciences research can say. Progress is made by following half hunches and "A implies B, B is true, then maybe A is true" guesses. Of course then you need to establish proper controls and properly determine that A is true.
Even then once you run your experiment turns out that A is true only 60% of the time, but given the computed noise rates of the experiment, this suggests that in fact A is true 100% of the time and A becomes true even though it held only 60% of the time.
Science is only as clean cut as you suggest in your post t in simplified high-school descriptions. In fact, if you have enough A implies B, A implies C, A implies D statements with all of B, C, D, etc holding, scientists will conclude A and accept it as true, even though it has not yet been proven.
I'll use an analogy to protect the guilty, but at a certain company, I was interviewing for, shall we say, a test pilot position and they asked me how would I go about having people board the plane.
This was so mind bogglingly unrelated that I checked out of the interview process right then and there.
Puzzles work both ways. A good relevant one can help filter an unsuitable candidate. An irrelevant puzzle helps filter unsuitable companies. The division I was supposed to join went on to be disbanded about a year after that.
TFA mentions this: "Broad, conceptual questions are fine, but if you get specific, make sure that what you're asking actually applies to the position on offer."
"For example, if you're mostly a Java shop [...] don't give candidates a problem in Lisp just to throw them a curveball. [...] If the questions focus on trivia rather than your actual work environment, your test will have as much real-world value as a pub quiz, and you'll end up excluding candidates essentially for no reason."
The bigger question is why the need to typecast people into groups. This is a unique American phenomenon, where kids replicate racist structures from society into a cast system that doesn't quite exist in any other country in the world.
I mean, in every school in the world there are popular girls, sports types, ethnic groups, studious people, alternative people, but they generally mingle and can be seen partaking in various activities. Sure a goth is likelier to hang out with another goth, but you can still talk to them.
Not in the American system, where groups are segregated and mingling is frown upon by all sides.
The IRS does not accept cash payment
A quick google search suggests the above is pure BS. The IRS does take cash if you are willing to go to the proper office.
RIM is not the caliber of pre-Jobs Apple in the 90s (which was still quite innovative, just mismanaged).
I call BS. Apple in the 90s couldn't put out an incremental upgrade to their operating system, much less create anything innovative. It took two years with Steve at the helm before OS 9 came out. Not a single product released by Steve came from before his return as CEO.
Fire one or both of the current leadership, and we can talk turnaround.
Let's work with that premise for the sake of the argument. Then you agree, they are not too far gone: all they need to do is fire the CEOs and they are back in business, which supports my point. They still have time, but they better get moving.
Don't get ahead of yourselves.
Let's not forget that Apple came back from a far worse shape than this in the late 90s. It is way too early to say that "they just don't have time".
They better put a move on it, pronto, would be a much more accurate statement.
And your point is?
If you show me a person height pile of sand I can best estimate the size within a factor of 2 or so. Does that mean the pile of sand isn't there?
How about Mintzberg argument that MBAs over emphasize the executive aspect of management (making decisions) and de-emphasize the motivational aspects of being a manager?
In real life managers rarely needs to make decisions on the spot. There is time to evaluate the situation, start pilot projects, obtain feedback from them and proceed along the most promising areas.
The redundancy serves an important purpose, and any signal the sender can put on the medium, a receiver can be trained to interpret.
Indeed it can. It was called AskJeeves and the sender is the one who chose not to waste time using a redundant protocol when communicating with a receiver who doesn't need it.
You don't want to have to spend 30 seconds digging through menus with your eyes on a screen to get directions, either.
Again you are giving a (valid) argument for a spoken command but this has nothing to do with the reason quoted in the article that I took exception with: "because we are used to talking to other humans".
Geeks hate it when normal people are able to do creative and status-earning things with computers, because it strikes at the heart of the modern geeks prestige.
Wow, somebody's got problems.
"Wake me up in eight hours" is much easier and faster to say than setting up a timer
And "alarm. 8am" is even easier and it has nearly nothing to do with the way we communicate with humans (think "tea, earl gray, hot").
Look, I'm not saying there aren't times you would rather talk than type, what I'm saying is that its benefits and drawbacks have little to do with the fact that we use speech to talk to other humans.
Furthermore studies have shown that verbalizing one's need is an energy intensive process. So if I show you a menu with four options and ask you to either click on one or say it out loud, clicking is easier.
The article makes the common mistake of assuming that since language is optimized for human-to-human communication then it is a preferable form of communication between humans and other entities.
For starters human-to-human communication has a huge amount of redundancy. We repeat, reinforce, gesture with our hands and gesticulate with our faces to make sure our message is coming across. Mr. Spock wouldn't need all of that repetition, and neither does the computer.
You don't want to have to tell to the car "can you please apply the brakes now?" it is much easier, and yes, more natural to simply press a button or step on the brake pedal.
You don't believe me still? Armies all over the world establish a special communication protocol that purposely moves away from natural language communication with all its ambiguities to a command/control sparse language with just the right amount of redundancy to deal with noisy communications.
Captain: "Right full rudder, degree down angle."
Pilot: "Right full rudder, degree down angle, sir"
I suggest you read "Managers not MBAs". Prof. Mintzberg makes the case much better than I ever could and he is a teacher in the respected McGill MBA program.
Right, because it couldn't possibly have happened that the mailman was late picking up the mail, thus postmarking it September 18 even though it was dropped before 5pm on the 17th.
That just never happens, no siree bob.
We are also bad at estimating the odds when the random trial is not determined ahead of time. For example, let's say we are trying to prove/disprove that person A is stalking person B. Most people would accept as substantial proof a CCTV picture of A walking a few steps behind B.
However if we consider that A and B might know each other and hence move in similar circles, the chances that they ever appeared in a single frame are not that low. Still a bit of a coincidence, but not very surprising.
What would be proof is if we fixed three days ahead of time, when person B happened to be in places with full CCTV coverage, and then we came up with the same picture in one of those days. This coincidende is orders of magnitude less likely.
However most people confuse the two, and interpret the first one as if it was as unlikely as the second one.
I suspect the number of innocent in prison is quite a bit higher than we'd like to think.
I think the number that would actually be really high is innocent people on probation (perhaps after a short time served) who pleaded guilty just to avoid the grinding wheels of (in)justice.
The researchers found a single inconsistency in the FBI's case: the sample has too much tin. This alone is not enough to disprove it. There are alternative explanations.
As well, anecdotally, apparently even the most open and shut cases have at least one extremely odd occurrence that is hard to explain. And by open and shut cases I mean cases where the murderer took the police to where he had buried the bodies.
For example, the murderer drove in 10 minutes a distance than normally takes 25 minutes. Or a disgruntled former employee who lives nowhere the scene of the crime happened to walk by at the same time the guilty person was committing the murder.
On the other hand, it is also true that once policemen zero in on a potential target they have a really hard time retargeting their sights. This happened to Richard Jewell, who on the basis of the evidence should have been declared not a suspect much much earlier. But the FBI had become convinced he was guilty and kept on ignoring and rejecting exculpatory evidence.
"You claimed MBAs have no idea on how to deliver a quality product. I demonstrated otherwise."
You gave an example that they cover this in class, on paper. This is different than actually knowing something, To use an example, lawyers take ethic courses, but everybody knows its just for show, and as soon as they join the workforce they are expected to behave unethically, starting from charging you $2+ for every photocopy made by their secretary. How can that possibly be ethical?
"As I said, most software engineers are taught how to develop high quality reliable software. "
Thanks for bringing this up. This is a perfect example of what I'm trying to say. We really don't train Software engineers to produce quality software. We go through the motions, having them take some theoretical software engineering courses while at university. But most CS programs put out graduates that have never worked on a large project, that have never written anything bigger than a mock test suite, that have never had to maintain someone else's code. We put out code monkeys. Some of them become software engineers after they been long enough in the work force.