Yes, it is still detecting capacitance, and surface area is the primary factor. So theoretically a large amount of contact with one finger might look like two fingers. Note that they only demonstrate 1, 2, 5.
It is the same story as Mark Hurd. Hurd's sin was minor of the scale of things, but it appeared that he blatantly lied on something small and expected that he would never be held accountable because he was Mark Hurd.
If CEO does not lead by example, it is whatever you can get away, always, all the way down the chain. I suppose there are a number of companies where such is actually true. But the board of directors cannot not look the other way when under the bright lights of public scrutiny and expect to keep their cushy position.
Well, it's OK if the first generation had pretty limited usefulness - it will get better. Lighter weight and less power and more time between "recharges"? Technology seems to go that way.
It is vastly easier to build something that weighs 1000 tons and put it on a naval vessel. There are experiments in that direction, but zilch of proven value so far.
Something useful on an airplane is going to be at least three generations of technology better than the reliable technology on the boat. Whatever they are doing now on this airplane is going to have zero value in the hypothetical future where the real technology resides.
Due to the 104-meter fiber-optic cable, Victor's measurements occurred at least 14 billionths of a second after those of Alice and Bob, precluding the idea that the setting of the BiSA caused the polarization results to change. While comparatively few photons made it all the way through every step of the experiment, this is due to the difficulty of measurements with so few photons, rather than a problem with the results.
I think your hypothesis has merit. There is nothing in quantum mechanics that tells us the state of Alice's and Bob's detector cannot be linked to the state of the BiSA.
My understanding is that 911 dispatchers are trained to keep the person on the phone, keep that person talking and focusing on providing useful information. Among other things, keeping them talking helps keep the citizen calm and out of trouble. Yelling and giving orders are likely to be counterproductive. I have never heard a released 911 tape involving a dispatcher yelling, and I used to watch COPS and some of those other police shows where the exciting parts of a 911 tape are often played.
Furthermore, it is generally accepted practice that neighborhood watch persons avoid confrontation. The dispatcher reminding Zimmerman of something he should already know is quite sufficient. Of course, Zimmerman's attorney could argue that the hint was not understood, but it might be tantamount to admitting Zimmerman is not a very competent neighborhood watch person.
The key point here is that his expectation value was not necessarily great when he walked in the door. He could have lost 400k roughly as easily as he would win 500k, for an expectation value in the neighborhood of 100k, maybe a lot less. But once he won 500k he was playing on a very fair table will cash to play 100k hands.
From a mathematical POV, having won his 500k his expectation value was a small negative. But that small number also meant that he had time to see where luck might take him. If things go badly he just walks away 400k poorer having had some fun and enjoyed free meals, free drinks, a free hotel room, and free tickets to a show.
We do not have articles written about the guys who were almost as smart or smarter, and who lost 400k and walked away. The casinos love it when articles are written about outsmarting the casinos, as long as the details are either vague or they can easily learn to detect the gambit. For every person smart enough to outwit the casinos are a thousand guys who are not up to snuff but think they are.
Even this guy is hardly telling us everything, and that some details were private were part of the negotiations.
I am not a Google employee but having talked to a few friends who work there, it is not a typical company. The CEO has a standing weekly open session where any employee can give him question. And he most certainly does get grenades like "We just shut down project X that we brought in by acquiring that start up 19 months ago for Y million dollars. Does this make any sense? What are we doing in that space?" So Google is tolerant of pointed arguments backed by strong reasoning.
While I think you are mostly correct about typical companies, I am unclear if you understand how they actually work. Mid-upper and upper management are driven by the need to avoid blame for failures and take credit for successes. It is not necessarily that they do not care or they are stupid, but any "interesting" effort to improve the fundamental processes or culture of a company will involve 6-12 months of chaos where everyone will blame the manager/champion for every delay and failure, while nothing easy to take credit for will come out of it. These efforts have their real payoffs 12-24 months down the line, thus they are doomed unless they are championed by multiple top level executives.
Yes, there are stupid managers, too. Those managers perceive ambitious bright ideas as thinly veiled assertions that they are not doing their job. Unless you are a truly amazing office-politics ninja, I would suggest finding somewhere else to work (or keep your expectations low while you stay put).
Finally, I would say that I have worked with a number of incredibly smart engineers in Silicon Valley. About half these guys truly do see the big picture. The other half have a talent for seeing brilliant answers for the wrong questions. Not surprisingly, not all managers are so welcoming of ingenious ideas that are obviously going to fail. Are you sure you know which bucket you fall into?
You are one of the few that brought this up. Good catch. I might have dismissed your point here but then I remembered this part: "Unfortunately, [the junior employees] are still a long way from grasping the technologies used ".
Not only does this company outsources some of their work, they also hire two(!) engineers who are taking substantial time to grasp the technology, much less be productive on the product. I am feeling uneasy about this pattern.
Nonetheless Groupon primarily offers value to those businesses whose good will and brand recognition is so weak that a direct 50% or 60% off offer cannot fill those slots. In the long run, no company will stay in business if they stay in that zone. Which means Groupon must build volume from a few niche areas and new businesses, while established and successful business will inevitably shun them.
Groupon is not going to be a >$1 billion business selling 1 or 2 hairdresser slots per week from the myriad salons, and a few tickets to the theatre or wine tours. If Groupon cannot build a strong synergistic relationship to successful businesses, then they surely have no stickiness, and thus will eaten alive by new locally-focussed competitors and Google.
(1) The fuel cells that make this efficient conversion are expensive, so the power company may happily buy the hydrogen but that does not solve the bigger problem.
(2) When you drive to work, your car is probably near a location that will require more electricity -- not transmitting power long distances is an absolute gain.
(3) No one said you would be required to sell power to the grid, only that the option would be available and that appropriate mutual economic incentives could exist such that both you and the power company would be happy about the arrangement.
(4) The main advantage of distributed power comes from handling peak usage -- more than have the physical investment of the power company is for purposes of handling intermittent peaks; distributing power generation could mean cheaper power for everyone. Thus, realistically, the power company would rent your vehicle for 2-3 hours during the middle of the day, if you want to sign up for that. And it does not take a sophisticated system to know to opt out when your tank gets below a preferred minimum level.
The article is vague. But this is an old and excellent idea for hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles.
The basic idea is that good fuel cells are expensive. If a car is powered by a fuel cell, that is a significant capital investment that could be plugged in to the power grid. So, yes, the car owner could be "renting" his car to the power company, thereby providing electricity to the grid exactly in the vicinity where it is probably needed -- saving the cost of long distance power transmission.
Note that a hydrogen fuel cell is not restricted by the usual thermodynamic limit for power plants. Extremely high efficiencies are possible, provided there is a reasonable source of hydrogen, of course.
Most large companies now believe paying a fat premium for consultants to do large & complex IT project work is cheaper than trying to build up a big IT department with the full array of necessary skills and managing that department effectively year after year after year.
It is likely this trend is still on the upswing, because (1) once a large company goes down that path it tends to be a long term commitment, and (2) it is an attractive approach to any company with legacy systems who lacks less than 150% confidence in the hiring skills and project management skills of their IT department, (3) even companies who are already going this direction do not switch over all systems at once -- there is still more work to do.
One of the reasons that private parties are installing those cameras and cheerfully sending the feed to the police is because many of those public spaces include areas that are privately owned and maintained. So, the private parties are more than happy to have peeing in public prosecuted. In fact, they are probably hoping such will happen, among other positive things.
I have seriously considered setting up a camera to catch the teenagers who regularly drive much too fast on the curvy little road with no sidewalks on which I live. This can be dangerous stuff. And I would like to catch those same teenagers when they toss an empty beer bottle into the bushes. Or when some random jerk leaves the dog poop on the road.
If a private citizen or a private business can provide clear evidence of a crime and can identify the perpetrator, even a small crime, why shouldn't the police purse the issue, if resources are available?
Those "non-serious" crimes are things that people like me bear the burden of cleaning up after. If happened to have that camera set up, I would be willing to
A licensse can ask for a lower price in return for a provision that the ultimate validity of the patent is irrelevant. Or the opposite. Obviously, the implicit threat is a drawn out and uncertain legal battle where the would be licenser may end up with nothing buy legal fees.
If you own a smart phone, then, yes, Jobs has made your life better. Regardless of your choice in phone, Jobs has directly or indirectly made your phone smarter, cheaper, and easier to use.
Sell off the less profitable unit and divert that money into the more successful one. This is ideal if the company can obtain more market share with more capital (newer manufacturing, more manufacturing, more programmers to meet feature demands from the market.) If this is the case, they will be more profitable under the single activity.
Yes, that is the hope, to be sure. And in the real world, sometimes the opposite turns out to be true.
It is often the case that slightly less profitable products open the doors into bigger and more exciting deals. One of HP's strengths is they can build out whole data centers for Fortune 1000 companies, with oodles of their HP branded hardware. Thus they achieve effective lock-ins, because the customer is stuck with a long-term relationship with HP, whether they like it or not.
Does HP make more profit building out a data center with, say, Dell hardware? Maybe. Or maybe not. And we the contract is up for renewal, HP does not have the same access to the inside track.
Most big companies are swimming in cash. If HP needs to sell a division for cash, it is either a mismanaged company, or they are looking for cash to finance aggressive acquisitions. HP is profitable enough that any of its most profitable division should not have trouble financing strong organic growth or modest-sized acquisitions.
How on Earth did HP come to appoint a CEO from a software-only company that has probably never seen an end user customer in his life?
This may be the most insightful comment in this thread. In hindsight I think it should be obvious that this is the direction the board wanted to go. Why else would they appoint Apotheker as CEO? He makes no sense as CEO otherwise.
HP's vision of its own future seems to be that the real money is made in selling consulting services for building big corporate software solutions out of existing technologies. This is not news. They have been trying to emulate IBM and Oracle for a while now.
Fiorina may have bought Compaq, but the annihilation of any meaningful amount of genuine innovation was well under way under her reign.
Hardware is a means to get a foot in the door and keep the customer an HP shop, but is not the primary really the place that will generate profit growth. That said, dumping or starving hardware divisions that are, in fact, profitable seems like a lack of vision to me.
I do think that HP is stumbling on a major opportunity with respect to smart phones and pads. Corporate IT departments are uncertain right now over which or whether to support a non-Apple smart phone or pad device. Android offers a mess of too many slightly different devices.
A nimble HP could offer a compelling solution to big corporate clients. There is a window of opportunity that behemoths like Google, IBM, and Oracle do not have the hardware chops to execute on. Whether it is WebOS or Android is not necessarily important.
Or that black professors choose to work at more teaching-focused schools with weaker research programs.
I was wondering about that myself.
Research grants are awarded to institutions that have been awarded grants in the past for many good reasons. A successful past grant tends to leave physical resources and institutional resources in its wake -- everything from an extra oscilloscope someone in the department can borrow, to experience writing papers, to department secretaries who can handle to funding paperwork in a timely manner so that people get paid.
A small institution with few or no grants under its belt is more likely to outright fail with a future grant. And while in the process of doing not very well, they are much less likely to get any help moving things in a better direction when necessary.
Evading expected patterns does not require randomness.
True. But evading a pattern has significant implicit costs to the criminal, thus making perpetrating crimes more difficult indirectly.
In Realityland, the vast majority of criminals are not deep thinkers planning a big score. They go with what seems to work and repeat a pattern.
But even simply forcing the muggers to prey on a different neighborhood every two weeks means they are more likely to make dumb mistakes that get them caught, or worse.
When exactly was this golden age of reasoned debate and difficult ideas debated rationally in public?
The US Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the massive US intervention in Vietnam, the 2003 invasion of Iraq were all manufactured political crises where emotionalism won the day over reason.
On your first point, it is an interesting question. When it comes to risk of life and limb, the law may be clear cut. Does Microsoft send us notification for every new known theoretical vulnerability? Did the manufacturer of your old wireless sitting in the corner of your home office firewall/router send your notification about every new hack that could compromise security? I think the answer here is no, but maybe someone has useful information on that question.
On your second point, EULAs protect the manufacturer. And they have already expanded to a size that 99.99% of the purchasers surely do not read them. Whether the EULA is 5 pages or 15 pages is no longer important.
Most Civil Engineers and Architects have passed rigorous certifications, and it is an absolute requirement for promotions. Some Mechanical Engineers have passed rigorous certifications. Some Electrical Engineers have.
But the weak point in security is usually the design of the software and the implementation details of the software. Have you ever seen a certified Software Security Engineer sign off on the fitness of a product for a certain purpose, affirm that it meets explicit industry standards, and accept possible civil and criminal liability for any egregious flaw with the product?
"Caring" is a meaningless word, unless proven with action. The question is how much resources, in both time and money, are the consumers willing to invest in order to be more secure.
"Informing" the consumer is problematic, because once we get past some rock bottom basics about passwords and credit card numbers and phishing, the average consumer cannot understand the specific issues involved without enormous, tedious research and education which they just are not going to do. Informing sounds nice, but if they lack the fundamental understanding to make a sound decision in the full technical context, it is a lot of noise that makes the product look bad to no obvious useful purpose.
The answer is to have standards, created by experts. Something like the moral equivalent of UL certification that this toaster is very unlikely to kill you.
The less than ideal but practical answer is to have name brands. It is one of the many reasons that Apple can charge a premium -- it is very rare for their products to be screwed up by random viruses or driver issues. For all that serious hackers often decry the locked gates, many consumers are intentionally paying more money for exactly that.
Owning 90% of any market means nothing if you cannot produce the commensurate profits and do not have positive prospects for future profits. MS stock is down because their prospects for future growth is very modest, relative to other tech companies, in every market they have a toe in.
Apple has demonstrated the ability to generate immense profits on what you dismiss as "marginally different" products. That seems to confuse you. It is perfectly obvious to me what is going on. And it is perfectly obvious to hoards of consumers with money in their pockets -- the people who actually matter.
Apple has been playing this game very skillfully for the last 12+ years. They show every sign of getting better and better at it. I would note that everyone was holding their breath about the pad competitors, and wondering if the real electronic consumers giants would eat Apple's lunch. With the iPad2 revealed now it is apparent that the iPad2, 3, and 4 are quite likely to crush all comers with better technical specs and better user experience at a lower price.
Apple won. And they are likely to stay in the driver's seat past 2016. In fact, the only thing slowing Apple down now is that Google is willing to give away hundreds of millions of dollars of technology for free as a desperate bid to keep Apple from walking away with whole new profitable markets.
Apple has a track record of creating compelling and very profitable "good looking package(s)" where other have failed over and over and over again. That may not rate as rarefied pure research, but it is a pretty astounding accomplishment.
Really, this is no less impressive than the Wright brothers building the first heavier than air flying machine. They figured out an approach that would fly pretty good and then better and better with careful, when plenty of other smart and better funded engineers could only build machines that crashed.
And, just like Apple, there was no particularly interesting technology that the Wright brother's created from whole cloth. At a pure technical and scientific level, the Wright brothers' rivals' efforts were similar or better in many or most respects.
The genius of the Wright brothers was not in inventing new technology. Their genius was in carefully and methodically discovering what were the key requirements to make a machine fly, and improving those incrementally until they succeeded.
Apple is much the same way. They do not throw cool technology into a bucket and brag about what great engineering went into that market flop. They see what the consumers want but do not have, and figure out what will be a good enough package to hit it just a few feet beyond the center-left field fence.
Well, I think S&P is a perfectly worthless organization.
But, in their defense, the nature of "the deal" creates the likelihood of a very real, if temporary, default in the foreseeable near future. Any failure of the US gov't to pay its bills, even for a day, can put very real persons and very real businesses in technical bankruptcy.
S&P is correct. The US gov't moved from "You can literally bet your physical and financial life these guys will pay their bills" to "Hey, they will pay, but it could well take 24 or 72 hours longer to get your money to you. Plan accordingly."
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Yes, it is still detecting capacitance, and surface area is the primary factor. So theoretically a large amount of contact with one finger might look like two fingers. Note that they only demonstrate 1, 2, 5.
It is the same story as Mark Hurd. Hurd's sin was minor of the scale of things, but it appeared that he blatantly lied on something small and expected that he would never be held accountable because he was Mark Hurd.
If CEO does not lead by example, it is whatever you can get away, always, all the way down the chain. I suppose there are a number of companies where such is actually true. But the board of directors cannot not look the other way when under the bright lights of public scrutiny and expect to keep their cushy position.
Well, it's OK if the first generation had pretty limited usefulness - it will get better. Lighter weight and less power and more time between "recharges"? Technology seems to go that way.
It is vastly easier to build something that weighs 1000 tons and put it on a naval vessel. There are experiments in that direction, but zilch of proven value so far.
Something useful on an airplane is going to be at least three generations of technology better than the reliable technology on the boat. Whatever they are doing now on this airplane is going to have zero value in the hypothetical future where the real technology resides.
Due to the 104-meter fiber-optic cable, Victor's measurements occurred at least 14 billionths of a second after those of Alice and Bob, precluding the idea that the setting of the BiSA caused the polarization results to change. While comparatively few photons made it all the way through every step of the experiment, this is due to the difficulty of measurements with so few photons, rather than a problem with the results.
I think your hypothesis has merit. There is nothing in quantum mechanics that tells us the state of Alice's and Bob's detector cannot be linked to the state of the BiSA.
My understanding is that 911 dispatchers are trained to keep the person on the phone, keep that person talking and focusing on providing useful information. Among other things, keeping them talking helps keep the citizen calm and out of trouble. Yelling and giving orders are likely to be counterproductive. I have never heard a released 911 tape involving a dispatcher yelling, and I used to watch COPS and some of those other police shows where the exciting parts of a 911 tape are often played.
Furthermore, it is generally accepted practice that neighborhood watch persons avoid confrontation. The dispatcher reminding Zimmerman of something he should already know is quite sufficient. Of course, Zimmerman's attorney could argue that the hint was not understood, but it might be tantamount to admitting Zimmerman is not a very competent neighborhood watch person.
The key point here is that his expectation value was not necessarily great when he walked in the door. He could have lost 400k roughly as easily as he would win 500k, for an expectation value in the neighborhood of 100k, maybe a lot less. But once he won 500k he was playing on a very fair table will cash to play 100k hands.
From a mathematical POV, having won his 500k his expectation value was a small negative. But that small number also meant that he had time to see where luck might take him. If things go badly he just walks away 400k poorer having had some fun and enjoyed free meals, free drinks, a free hotel room, and free tickets to a show.
We do not have articles written about the guys who were almost as smart or smarter, and who lost 400k and walked away. The casinos love it when articles are written about outsmarting the casinos, as long as the details are either vague or they can easily learn to detect the gambit. For every person smart enough to outwit the casinos are a thousand guys who are not up to snuff but think they are.
Even this guy is hardly telling us everything, and that some details were private were part of the negotiations.
I am not a Google employee but having talked to a few friends who work there, it is not a typical company. The CEO has a standing weekly open session where any employee can give him question. And he most certainly does get grenades like "We just shut down project X that we brought in by acquiring that start up 19 months ago for Y million dollars. Does this make any sense? What are we doing in that space?" So Google is tolerant of pointed arguments backed by strong reasoning.
While I think you are mostly correct about typical companies, I am unclear if you understand how they actually work. Mid-upper and upper management are driven by the need to avoid blame for failures and take credit for successes. It is not necessarily that they do not care or they are stupid, but any "interesting" effort to improve the fundamental processes or culture of a company will involve 6-12 months of chaos where everyone will blame the manager/champion for every delay and failure, while nothing easy to take credit for will come out of it. These efforts have their real payoffs 12-24 months down the line, thus they are doomed unless they are championed by multiple top level executives.
Yes, there are stupid managers, too. Those managers perceive ambitious bright ideas as thinly veiled assertions that they are not doing their job. Unless you are a truly amazing office-politics ninja, I would suggest finding somewhere else to work (or keep your expectations low while you stay put).
Finally, I would say that I have worked with a number of incredibly smart engineers in Silicon Valley. About half these guys truly do see the big picture. The other half have a talent for seeing brilliant answers for the wrong questions. Not surprisingly, not all managers are so welcoming of ingenious ideas that are obviously going to fail. Are you sure you know which bucket you fall into?
You are one of the few that brought this up. Good catch. I might have dismissed your point here but then I remembered this part: "Unfortunately, [the junior employees] are still a long way from grasping the technologies used ".
Not only does this company outsources some of their work, they also hire two(!) engineers who are taking substantial time to grasp the technology, much less be productive on the product. I am feeling uneasy about this pattern.
Good point.
Nonetheless Groupon primarily offers value to those businesses whose good will and brand recognition is so weak that a direct 50% or 60% off offer cannot fill those slots. In the long run, no company will stay in business if they stay in that zone. Which means Groupon must build volume from a few niche areas and new businesses, while established and successful business will inevitably shun them.
Groupon is not going to be a >$1 billion business selling 1 or 2 hairdresser slots per week from the myriad salons, and a few tickets to the theatre or wine tours. If Groupon cannot build a strong synergistic relationship to successful businesses, then they surely have no stickiness, and thus will eaten alive by new locally-focussed competitors and Google.
(1) The fuel cells that make this efficient conversion are expensive, so the power company may happily buy the hydrogen but that does not solve the bigger problem.
(2) When you drive to work, your car is probably near a location that will require more electricity -- not transmitting power long distances is an absolute gain.
(3) No one said you would be required to sell power to the grid, only that the option would be available and that appropriate mutual economic incentives could exist such that both you and the power company would be happy about the arrangement.
(4) The main advantage of distributed power comes from handling peak usage -- more than have the physical investment of the power company is for purposes of handling intermittent peaks; distributing power generation could mean cheaper power for everyone. Thus, realistically, the power company would rent your vehicle for 2-3 hours during the middle of the day, if you want to sign up for that. And it does not take a sophisticated system to know to opt out when your tank gets below a preferred minimum level.
The article is vague. But this is an old and excellent idea for hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles.
The basic idea is that good fuel cells are expensive. If a car is powered by a fuel cell, that is a significant capital investment that could be plugged in to the power grid. So, yes, the car owner could be "renting" his car to the power company, thereby providing electricity to the grid exactly in the vicinity where it is probably needed -- saving the cost of long distance power transmission.
Note that a hydrogen fuel cell is not restricted by the usual thermodynamic limit for power plants. Extremely high efficiencies are possible, provided there is a reasonable source of hydrogen, of course.
Most large companies now believe paying a fat premium for consultants to do large & complex IT project work is cheaper than trying to build up a big IT department with the full array of necessary skills and managing that department effectively year after year after year.
It is likely this trend is still on the upswing, because (1) once a large company goes down that path it tends to be a long term commitment, and (2) it is an attractive approach to any company with legacy systems who lacks less than 150% confidence in the hiring skills and project management skills of their IT department, (3) even companies who are already going this direction do not switch over all systems at once -- there is still more work to do.
One of the reasons that private parties are installing those cameras and cheerfully sending the feed to the police is because many of those public spaces include areas that are privately owned and maintained. So, the private parties are more than happy to have peeing in public prosecuted. In fact, they are probably hoping such will happen, among other positive things.
I have seriously considered setting up a camera to catch the teenagers who regularly drive much too fast on the curvy little road with no sidewalks on which I live. This can be dangerous stuff. And I would like to catch those same teenagers when they toss an empty beer bottle into the bushes. Or when some random jerk leaves the dog poop on the road.
If a private citizen or a private business can provide clear evidence of a crime and can identify the perpetrator, even a small crime, why shouldn't the police purse the issue, if resources are available?
Those "non-serious" crimes are things that people like me bear the burden of cleaning up after. If happened to have that camera set up, I would be willing to
That is a point of negotiation.
A licensse can ask for a lower price in return for a provision that the ultimate validity of the patent is irrelevant. Or the opposite. Obviously, the implicit threat is a drawn out and uncertain legal battle where the would be licenser may end up with nothing buy legal fees.
If you own a smart phone, then, yes, Jobs has made your life better. Regardless of your choice in phone, Jobs has directly or indirectly made your phone smarter, cheaper, and easier to use.
Sell off the less profitable unit and divert that money into the more successful one. This is ideal if the company can obtain more market share with more capital (newer manufacturing, more manufacturing, more programmers to meet feature demands from the market.) If this is the case, they will be more profitable under the single activity.
Yes, that is the hope, to be sure. And in the real world, sometimes the opposite turns out to be true.
It is often the case that slightly less profitable products open the doors into bigger and more exciting deals. One of HP's strengths is they can build out whole data centers for Fortune 1000 companies, with oodles of their HP branded hardware. Thus they achieve effective lock-ins, because the customer is stuck with a long-term relationship with HP, whether they like it or not.
Does HP make more profit building out a data center with, say, Dell hardware? Maybe. Or maybe not. And we the contract is up for renewal, HP does not have the same access to the inside track.
Most big companies are swimming in cash. If HP needs to sell a division for cash, it is either a mismanaged company, or they are looking for cash to finance aggressive acquisitions. HP is profitable enough that any of its most profitable division should not have trouble financing strong organic growth or modest-sized acquisitions.
This may be the most insightful comment in this thread. In hindsight I think it should be obvious that this is the direction the board wanted to go. Why else would they appoint Apotheker as CEO? He makes no sense as CEO otherwise.
HP's vision of its own future seems to be that the real money is made in selling consulting services for building big corporate software solutions out of existing technologies. This is not news. They have been trying to emulate IBM and Oracle for a while now.
Fiorina may have bought Compaq, but the annihilation of any meaningful amount of genuine innovation was well under way under her reign.
Hardware is a means to get a foot in the door and keep the customer an HP shop, but is not the primary really the place that will generate profit growth. That said, dumping or starving hardware divisions that are, in fact, profitable seems like a lack of vision to me.
I do think that HP is stumbling on a major opportunity with respect to smart phones and pads. Corporate IT departments are uncertain right now over which or whether to support a non-Apple smart phone or pad device. Android offers a mess of too many slightly different devices.
A nimble HP could offer a compelling solution to big corporate clients. There is a window of opportunity that behemoths like Google, IBM, and Oracle do not have the hardware chops to execute on. Whether it is WebOS or Android is not necessarily important.
Or that black professors choose to work at more teaching-focused schools with weaker research programs.
I was wondering about that myself.
Research grants are awarded to institutions that have been awarded grants in the past for many good reasons. A successful past grant tends to leave physical resources and institutional resources in its wake -- everything from an extra oscilloscope someone in the department can borrow, to experience writing papers, to department secretaries who can handle to funding paperwork in a timely manner so that people get paid.
A small institution with few or no grants under its belt is more likely to outright fail with a future grant. And while in the process of doing not very well, they are much less likely to get any help moving things in a better direction when necessary.
Evading expected patterns does not require randomness.
True. But evading a pattern has significant implicit costs to the criminal, thus making perpetrating crimes more difficult indirectly.
In Realityland, the vast majority of criminals are not deep thinkers planning a big score. They go with what seems to work and repeat a pattern.
But even simply forcing the muggers to prey on a different neighborhood every two weeks means they are more likely to make dumb mistakes that get them caught, or worse.
When exactly was this golden age of reasoned debate and difficult ideas debated rationally in public?
The US Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the massive US intervention in Vietnam, the 2003 invasion of Iraq were all manufactured political crises where emotionalism won the day over reason.
On your first point, it is an interesting question. When it comes to risk of life and limb, the law may be clear cut. Does Microsoft send us notification for every new known theoretical vulnerability? Did the manufacturer of your old wireless sitting in the corner of your home office firewall/router send your notification about every new hack that could compromise security? I think the answer here is no, but maybe someone has useful information on that question.
On your second point, EULAs protect the manufacturer. And they have already expanded to a size that 99.99% of the purchasers surely do not read them. Whether the EULA is 5 pages or 15 pages is no longer important.
Most Civil Engineers and Architects have passed rigorous certifications, and it is an absolute requirement for promotions. Some Mechanical Engineers have passed rigorous certifications. Some Electrical Engineers have.
But the weak point in security is usually the design of the software and the implementation details of the software. Have you ever seen a certified Software Security Engineer sign off on the fitness of a product for a certain purpose, affirm that it meets explicit industry standards, and accept possible civil and criminal liability for any egregious flaw with the product?
Senior civil engineers do as much all the time.
"Caring" is a meaningless word, unless proven with action. The question is how much resources, in both time and money, are the consumers willing to invest in order to be more secure.
"Informing" the consumer is problematic, because once we get past some rock bottom basics about passwords and credit card numbers and phishing, the average consumer cannot understand the specific issues involved without enormous, tedious research and education which they just are not going to do. Informing sounds nice, but if they lack the fundamental understanding to make a sound decision in the full technical context, it is a lot of noise that makes the product look bad to no obvious useful purpose.
The answer is to have standards, created by experts. Something like the moral equivalent of UL certification that this toaster is very unlikely to kill you.
The less than ideal but practical answer is to have name brands. It is one of the many reasons that Apple can charge a premium -- it is very rare for their products to be screwed up by random viruses or driver issues. For all that serious hackers often decry the locked gates, many consumers are intentionally paying more money for exactly that.
Your arguments make no sense.
Owning 90% of any market means nothing if you cannot produce the commensurate profits and do not have positive prospects for future profits. MS stock is down because their prospects for future growth is very modest, relative to other tech companies, in every market they have a toe in.
Apple has demonstrated the ability to generate immense profits on what you dismiss as "marginally different" products. That seems to confuse you. It is perfectly obvious to me what is going on. And it is perfectly obvious to hoards of consumers with money in their pockets -- the people who actually matter.
Apple has been playing this game very skillfully for the last 12+ years. They show every sign of getting better and better at it. I would note that everyone was holding their breath about the pad competitors, and wondering if the real electronic consumers giants would eat Apple's lunch. With the iPad2 revealed now it is apparent that the iPad2, 3, and 4 are quite likely to crush all comers with better technical specs and better user experience at a lower price.
Apple won. And they are likely to stay in the driver's seat past 2016. In fact, the only thing slowing Apple down now is that Google is willing to give away hundreds of millions of dollars of technology for free as a desperate bid to keep Apple from walking away with whole new profitable markets.
Please mod parent down.
Apple has a track record of creating compelling and very profitable "good looking package(s)" where other have failed over and over and over again. That may not rate as rarefied pure research, but it is a pretty astounding accomplishment.
Really, this is no less impressive than the Wright brothers building the first heavier than air flying machine. They figured out an approach that would fly pretty good and then better and better with careful, when plenty of other smart and better funded engineers could only build machines that crashed.
And, just like Apple, there was no particularly interesting technology that the Wright brother's created from whole cloth. At a pure technical and scientific level, the Wright brothers' rivals' efforts were similar or better in many or most respects.
The genius of the Wright brothers was not in inventing new technology. Their genius was in carefully and methodically discovering what were the key requirements to make a machine fly, and improving those incrementally until they succeeded.
Apple is much the same way. They do not throw cool technology into a bucket and brag about what great engineering went into that market flop. They see what the consumers want but do not have, and figure out what will be a good enough package to hit it just a few feet beyond the center-left field fence.
Well, I think S&P is a perfectly worthless organization.
But, in their defense, the nature of "the deal" creates the likelihood of a very real, if temporary, default in the foreseeable near future. Any failure of the US gov't to pay its bills, even for a day, can put very real persons and very real businesses in technical bankruptcy.
S&P is correct. The US gov't moved from "You can literally bet your physical and financial life these guys will pay their bills" to "Hey, they will pay, but it could well take 24 or 72 hours longer to get your money to you. Plan accordingly."