So by definition, everything Apple does is the best it can be, right? Wrong. Apple would be worth even more if it were even more satisfying to its customers. Its profits would be higher.
Besides, "they" doesn't really mean anything in "they have the 2nd largest valuation". Apple stock is very widely held, and its valuation is the sum of all its shareholders. Apple rarely if ever issues any stock anymore, so the stock valuation doesn't return any money to Apple itself. The people holding the stock benefit when the stock price goes up (higher than they paid) if they sell it, but the buyers don't benefit - by the same amount in the other direction. In any case even more customer satisfaction would mean stock prices rising even higher.
It would be better for everyone if Apple's supply chain management never stopped someone from buying their product, enough that Apple could sell into the corporate market better.
I said rarely. Your rare exception(s) isn't going to demonstrate where my argument doesn't hold.
Science of large systems is done by statistics. Science of small systems is done by logic. You have demonstrated you have competence in neither. But you're so incompetent that you think that shows you're correct.There is no point talking further with you about it, because you are propping up your foregone conclusion with fallacies.
A single Nobel winner is what we know as "rarely".
No, you're not using the Socratic Method. You're using the converse accident fallacy. Socrates didn't use logical fallacies to examine the logic underlying a disagreement.
Because private businesses are competent? We read on Slashdot about their making this same mistake all the time. Why would some temp working for some defense contractor be any better? Especially when those temps are likely to be not just outsourced, but offshored? I can see plenty of, say, Pakistani office temps caring even less about protecting UK government secrets than their equivalent who is actually a citizen of the country at risk when the secret is divulged.
Actual secrets of military technology are legitimate secrets, as long as the military secrets are being overseen by competent people with power independent of the military - who are themselves catchable when they're corrupt.
But the problem isn't this secret. It's the vast abundance of secrets in governments like the UK's. Some percentage of secrets are going to be divulged when they shouldn't. Having millions of secrets means that percentage results in a lot of divulged secrets.
Perhaps the large number of secrets that are worthless, or are secret only to protect someone who did something wrong rather than to protect the country, means that most divulged secrets harm no one - or harm people who did wrong. But the large number of secrets makes the percentage divulged increase. Especially when the worthless ones divulged get everyone used to divulging secrets. Then the percentage goes way up. And the secrets worth keeping do a lot of damage.
Proper management calls for reducing the amount of secrets to the minimum. This is a fundamental principle known to any competent info security professional, and to many amateurs - in any field. But governments keep increasing their trove of secrets. Mostly because governments keep increasing the number of things they do wrong. And keeping too many secrets, many (if not most) of them worthless or even beneficial to reveal, is just one of the things they're doing wrong.
It's the worst kept secret in the secrecy business.
Consumers suffer from the same problems businesses have: no product to buy when they sell out. That supply chain mismanagement is probably less a marketing problem among consumers, since they're less likely than a corporate procurement department to commit long term to a different product because of the risk. But it does still interfere. And it's still a poor reflection on Apple, which could make more money even among only non-business consumers if it had more units ready to sell to eager buyers.
Supply chain mismanagement isn't some new Apple innovation. It's got a long history among vendors of all kinds of products. I like Apple and its products enough that I wish it could fix this fundamental problem. I personally can jockey any kind of computer that's ever been made, but I've worked in, with and for many companies where I wished the rest of the office could have a Mac because it would have been easier for them to do their jobs with it.
As I said, the problem has never changed. So in fact the supply chain management now has the same problems as it did then. As we can see from the actual same problems.
Northern Telecom changing its name to Nortel is a completely irrelevant point. As is indeed the way that Nortel has fared in the past few years, a decade and a half after the events in question.
The scientific community is rarely wrong about a major conclusion that many thousands of scientists agree with high confidence over many years of research. At least not as wrong as the climate change deniers say: "totally wrong - and by corruption". Whole large scientific fields can be inaccurate to some small percentage. Or sometimes in purely theoretical or cosmos-scale branches. Or perhaps many generations ago, without the benefit of large and accurate physical measurements, after generations of testing previous theories.
The scientific consensus is that the long term consequences of human activity's excess CO2 production increasing temperature is climate change large enough to extinct large numbers of species and disrupt agriculture and other large scale activities human civilization depends on. The scientific consensus is that the most effective intervention is to dramatically reduce CO2 production, to at most 350-400PPM, or face those long term consequences.
Look, you used to deny climate change completely. Then you denied humans were causing it. Now you're denying that scientists have the consensus I just repeated for you. None of this is news. You and the rest of the straggling deniers are just wasting the time we have left to do something about it. Just quit the FUD and stop making it harder to save ourselves - and you and your ilk with us.
Nobody says climatologists are pure altruists. All people say is that they're generally competent at their jobs, and aren't especially corrupt. Because there's no legitimate reason to say otherwise. There are illegitimate reasons to say otherwise: liars, polluters, the generally corrupt and the stupid have plenty of illegitimate reasons.
Success as a scientist requires that a lot of the science profession agrees that you have professional integrity. Science has some of the most objective, testable and routinely tested criteria for integrity.
Climatologists are professionals who overwhelmingly say humans are making too much CO2, because it's causing the climate to change in damaging ways. Corrupt and stupid people lie about that for their own personal (or simply psychological) benefit. It's not any more complicated than that.
I can't hear you saying that when a bag over your head concentrates that "vital gas" for you. Not for very long, anyway. I encourage you to try it. Superglue a kevlar bag around your neck to show your confidence.
BTW, the couple hundred extra degrees of heat in a match are totally dwarfed by the many hundreds of degrees of heat already in the fuse. But that little bit extra is the difference between nothing and BANG!
The real question is what drives you climate change deniers to make such easily debunked statements. The pros are getting paid by the petrofuel corps. But peons like you are just stupid.
Whenever Apple introduces a new model or product, there's never enough to meet demand. To fans, that must look like quite a desirable achievement, and why not? Selling out seems the definition of maximum success.
But why doesn't Apple just make more? They aren't making the maximum amount. They're leaving some customers with money and no satisfaction. What Apple does is underestimate the needs of their customers. And is encouraged by all the PR from the "selling out - maximum success" fallacy.
Since the 1980s Apple has been scaring businesses away from using their products for this very reason. Which business wants to depend on PCs for every one of 150 people quickly hired in Q4, but then those amazing Macs just aren't available? Who cares how good they are when you can't get them? This is not some speculative argument. I worked for Northern Telecom in the mid 1990s, when it was (famously) Apple's biggest customer. I was part of an R&D group that was in the debate there to drop Apple for Microsoft (and, I think, HP) instead. The reason was the undependable Apple supply chain. The risk (that often came true) of no PC on the desks of new hires was a constant roadblock there. And this was a company very well dedicated to Apple, in public and in capital investments. They dropped Apple.
So long as Apple keeps having this problem, and keeps treating it like a triumph, Apple will continue to be ignored by serious businesses.
This cool Web app is not "Linux in Javascript". It is in fact a "Javascript PC Emulator", just as the app says in the app's page title. It's a bootloader and a virtual PC implemented in Javascript running in the browser JS engine. Which loads a stripped-down Linux binary into itself and runs it, as if it were running on the PC. The Linux was written in C, compiled into PC (x86) machine instructions like any PC Linux, and then runs on the Javascript PC emulator.
I suppose it might be possible to run a Windows binary on it, if that bloatware would fit in the browser. Maybe DOS, or even Novell Netware (though this Linux demo has its networking stripped, and in any case the browser enforces the originating-server-only network access).
Very admirable project. Truly journalistic bad headline and summary.
This web app would be even cooler if the local Linux state could be synced with a server's state. If I could run commands locally, generating a history file that I could send to a server to execute over again there. Or vice versa, where I create state in the local Linux by rerunning history commands downloaded from the server. Or sync either direction, line by line. A kind of "VMWeb".
As it is I don't see any way to install any app in it, either by downloading a binary or by compiling typed-in source locally. In fact I don't see any network operations exposed to that shell. Which is too bad, since it's running in a complete network browser - to say nothing of reaching the network OS the browser is running in. The busybox installed in this instance doesn't seem to have any network commands enabled.
Can I get a JavaScript engine that copies the best features of MS PowerShell script (as PS has copied the best features of JS, Perl, csh, and Java/C++)?
Mainly I'm looking for a typed object pipeline with reflection the shell can access. Reflection that exposes APIs of all the classes (bundled in apps and in the OS) installed in the system. Which, as Javascript, should mean "installed in the Internet". Javascript that wraps reflection via CORBA or some other webservices registry/server would be extraordinary - a transformative technology. But just an object pipeline with language iterators and collections operators against localhost resources would be awesome.
You are wrong. As Oracle has been announcing, Javascript is now supported by (announced) technology in the Oracle JVM.
You were correct for a long time. When introduced, the only connection was a superficial syntax similarity that is shared with many other OOP languages. But, as I pointed out, the "Sun" JVM now has Javascript support in it. FWIW, I wasn't talking about the browser, either.
Most SW development isn't either to impress girls, make money, or even "scientific" curiosity (not eve CS). It's to enjoy doing something the doer has never themself done before, and/or have the results from your own labor. A pretty good amount of SW development motivated by that has pushed the world forward.
That is a lot different from hobbies like watching TV or playing video games. The difference is between producing something, and consuming something. Very little consumption has ever pushed the world forward - probably none by a single person (and any is vastly outweighed by pushing us backwards).
This particular hobbyist effort might not push the world forward. So what? Its equivalent is "let's make a tiny S-100 bus 6502 CPU into a personal computer mimicking a $100K IBM machine". A few dozen hobbyists doing that pushed the world far forward. The same happened with radio and plenty of other electronic hobbies, and (among the rich) with astronomy, botany and other hobbies become sciences.
And even here the "Linux in JS" effort is by a hobbyist specializing in embedded script engine development. This particular stunt might not push anything forward but their own expertise - or passion. Which is where world pushes come from.
Scrubbing a floor with a toothbrush is hazing partly because it's been done before, which makes it even more pointless - and so more tedious. "Linux in JS" is new, and so less pointless. Even if it is a terrible tool for running Linux. It's a pretty good tool for exercising the imagination, and the skills and commitment to back them up.
Slashdot Mirror
So by definition, everything Apple does is the best it can be, right? Wrong. Apple would be worth even more if it were even more satisfying to its customers. Its profits would be higher.
Besides, "they" doesn't really mean anything in "they have the 2nd largest valuation". Apple stock is very widely held, and its valuation is the sum of all its shareholders. Apple rarely if ever issues any stock anymore, so the stock valuation doesn't return any money to Apple itself. The people holding the stock benefit when the stock price goes up (higher than they paid) if they sell it, but the buyers don't benefit - by the same amount in the other direction. In any case even more customer satisfaction would mean stock prices rising even higher.
It would be better for everyone if Apple's supply chain management never stopped someone from buying their product, enough that Apple could sell into the corporate market better.
I said rarely. Your rare exception(s) isn't going to demonstrate where my argument doesn't hold.
Science of large systems is done by statistics. Science of small systems is done by logic. You have demonstrated you have competence in neither. But you're so incompetent that you think that shows you're correct.There is no point talking further with you about it, because you are propping up your foregone conclusion with fallacies.
Goodbye.
My favorite version of this meme is Borges' story "The Library of Babel".
A single Nobel winner is what we know as "rarely".
No, you're not using the Socratic Method. You're using the converse accident fallacy. Socrates didn't use logical fallacies to examine the logic underlying a disagreement.
Rarely. The kind of lawyering you're using to argue something important wouldn't convince any judge but the most corrupt one.
Plenty of other consumer products vendors handle this kind of problem without a hitch. Sony comes to mind.
It's not easy. But that's why they make the big bucks.
Because private businesses are competent? We read on Slashdot about their making this same mistake all the time. Why would some temp working for some defense contractor be any better? Especially when those temps are likely to be not just outsourced, but offshored? I can see plenty of, say, Pakistani office temps caring even less about protecting UK government secrets than their equivalent who is actually a citizen of the country at risk when the secret is divulged.
Actual secrets of military technology are legitimate secrets, as long as the military secrets are being overseen by competent people with power independent of the military - who are themselves catchable when they're corrupt.
But the problem isn't this secret. It's the vast abundance of secrets in governments like the UK's. Some percentage of secrets are going to be divulged when they shouldn't. Having millions of secrets means that percentage results in a lot of divulged secrets.
Perhaps the large number of secrets that are worthless, or are secret only to protect someone who did something wrong rather than to protect the country, means that most divulged secrets harm no one - or harm people who did wrong. But the large number of secrets makes the percentage divulged increase. Especially when the worthless ones divulged get everyone used to divulging secrets. Then the percentage goes way up. And the secrets worth keeping do a lot of damage.
Proper management calls for reducing the amount of secrets to the minimum. This is a fundamental principle known to any competent info security professional, and to many amateurs - in any field. But governments keep increasing their trove of secrets. Mostly because governments keep increasing the number of things they do wrong. And keeping too many secrets, many (if not most) of them worthless or even beneficial to reveal, is just one of the things they're doing wrong.
It's the worst kept secret in the secrecy business.
Whether or not they're better is irrelevant. That's the point. You're stupid.
Consumers suffer from the same problems businesses have: no product to buy when they sell out. That supply chain mismanagement is probably less a marketing problem among consumers, since they're less likely than a corporate procurement department to commit long term to a different product because of the risk. But it does still interfere. And it's still a poor reflection on Apple, which could make more money even among only non-business consumers if it had more units ready to sell to eager buyers.
Supply chain mismanagement isn't some new Apple innovation. It's got a long history among vendors of all kinds of products. I like Apple and its products enough that I wish it could fix this fundamental problem. I personally can jockey any kind of computer that's ever been made, but I've worked in, with and for many companies where I wished the rest of the office could have a Mac because it would have been easier for them to do their jobs with it.
As I said, the problem has never changed. So in fact the supply chain management now has the same problems as it did then. As we can see from the actual same problems.
Northern Telecom changing its name to Nortel is a completely irrelevant point. As is indeed the way that Nortel has fared in the past few years, a decade and a half after the events in question.
Your snotty counterpoints are meaningless.
So people good at their jobs can't make a lot of money from them, because they're not oil corp executives?
Dick Cheney, is that you?
Because they're not truths. They're lies.
No you don't. You're just a liar.
That's different from actual professionals who need money to do their work.
The scientific community is rarely wrong about a major conclusion that many thousands of scientists agree with high confidence over many years of research. At least not as wrong as the climate change deniers say: "totally wrong - and by corruption". Whole large scientific fields can be inaccurate to some small percentage. Or sometimes in purely theoretical or cosmos-scale branches. Or perhaps many generations ago, without the benefit of large and accurate physical measurements, after generations of testing previous theories.
The scientific consensus is that the long term consequences of human activity's excess CO2 production increasing temperature is climate change large enough to extinct large numbers of species and disrupt agriculture and other large scale activities human civilization depends on. The scientific consensus is that the most effective intervention is to dramatically reduce CO2 production, to at most 350-400PPM, or face those long term consequences.
Look, you used to deny climate change completely. Then you denied humans were causing it. Now you're denying that scientists have the consensus I just repeated for you. None of this is news. You and the rest of the straggling deniers are just wasting the time we have left to do something about it. Just quit the FUD and stop making it harder to save ourselves - and you and your ilk with us.
Nobody says climatologists are pure altruists. All people say is that they're generally competent at their jobs, and aren't especially corrupt. Because there's no legitimate reason to say otherwise. There are illegitimate reasons to say otherwise: liars, polluters, the generally corrupt and the stupid have plenty of illegitimate reasons.
Success as a scientist requires that a lot of the science profession agrees that you have professional integrity. Science has some of the most objective, testable and routinely tested criteria for integrity.
Climatologists are professionals who overwhelmingly say humans are making too much CO2, because it's causing the climate to change in damaging ways. Corrupt and stupid people lie about that for their own personal (or simply psychological) benefit. It's not any more complicated than that.
I can't hear you saying that when a bag over your head concentrates that "vital gas" for you. Not for very long, anyway. I encourage you to try it. Superglue a kevlar bag around your neck to show your confidence.
BTW, the couple hundred extra degrees of heat in a match are totally dwarfed by the many hundreds of degrees of heat already in the fuse. But that little bit extra is the difference between nothing and BANG!
The real question is what drives you climate change deniers to make such easily debunked statements. The pros are getting paid by the petrofuel corps. But peons like you are just stupid.
Whenever Apple introduces a new model or product, there's never enough to meet demand. To fans, that must look like quite a desirable achievement, and why not? Selling out seems the definition of maximum success.
But why doesn't Apple just make more? They aren't making the maximum amount. They're leaving some customers with money and no satisfaction. What Apple does is underestimate the needs of their customers. And is encouraged by all the PR from the "selling out - maximum success" fallacy.
Since the 1980s Apple has been scaring businesses away from using their products for this very reason. Which business wants to depend on PCs for every one of 150 people quickly hired in Q4, but then those amazing Macs just aren't available? Who cares how good they are when you can't get them? This is not some speculative argument. I worked for Northern Telecom in the mid 1990s, when it was (famously) Apple's biggest customer. I was part of an R&D group that was in the debate there to drop Apple for Microsoft (and, I think, HP) instead. The reason was the undependable Apple supply chain. The risk (that often came true) of no PC on the desks of new hires was a constant roadblock there. And this was a company very well dedicated to Apple, in public and in capital investments. They dropped Apple.
So long as Apple keeps having this problem, and keeps treating it like a triumph, Apple will continue to be ignored by serious businesses.
This cool Web app is not "Linux in Javascript". It is in fact a "Javascript PC Emulator", just as the app says in the app's page title. It's a bootloader and a virtual PC implemented in Javascript running in the browser JS engine. Which loads a stripped-down Linux binary into itself and runs it, as if it were running on the PC. The Linux was written in C, compiled into PC (x86) machine instructions like any PC Linux, and then runs on the Javascript PC emulator.
I suppose it might be possible to run a Windows binary on it, if that bloatware would fit in the browser. Maybe DOS, or even Novell Netware (though this Linux demo has its networking stripped, and in any case the browser enforces the originating-server-only network access).
Very admirable project. Truly journalistic bad headline and summary.
This web app would be even cooler if the local Linux state could be synced with a server's state. If I could run commands locally, generating a history file that I could send to a server to execute over again there. Or vice versa, where I create state in the local Linux by rerunning history commands downloaded from the server. Or sync either direction, line by line. A kind of "VMWeb".
As it is I don't see any way to install any app in it, either by downloading a binary or by compiling typed-in source locally. In fact I don't see any network operations exposed to that shell. Which is too bad, since it's running in a complete network browser - to say nothing of reaching the network OS the browser is running in. The busybox installed in this instance doesn't seem to have any network commands enabled.
Can I get a JavaScript engine that copies the best features of MS PowerShell script (as PS has copied the best features of JS, Perl, csh, and Java/C++)?
Mainly I'm looking for a typed object pipeline with reflection the shell can access. Reflection that exposes APIs of all the classes (bundled in apps and in the OS) installed in the system. Which, as Javascript, should mean "installed in the Internet". Javascript that wraps reflection via CORBA or some other webservices registry/server would be extraordinary - a transformative technology. But just an object pipeline with language iterators and collections operators against localhost resources would be awesome.
You are wrong. As Oracle has been announcing, Javascript is now supported by (announced) technology in the Oracle JVM.
You were correct for a long time. When introduced, the only connection was a superficial syntax similarity that is shared with many other OOP languages. But, as I pointed out, the "Sun" JVM now has Javascript support in it. FWIW, I wasn't talking about the browser, either.
Liar.
Most SW development isn't either to impress girls, make money, or even "scientific" curiosity (not eve CS). It's to enjoy doing something the doer has never themself done before, and/or have the results from your own labor. A pretty good amount of SW development motivated by that has pushed the world forward.
That is a lot different from hobbies like watching TV or playing video games. The difference is between producing something, and consuming something. Very little consumption has ever pushed the world forward - probably none by a single person (and any is vastly outweighed by pushing us backwards).
This particular hobbyist effort might not push the world forward. So what? Its equivalent is "let's make a tiny S-100 bus 6502 CPU into a personal computer mimicking a $100K IBM machine". A few dozen hobbyists doing that pushed the world far forward. The same happened with radio and plenty of other electronic hobbies, and (among the rich) with astronomy, botany and other hobbies become sciences.
And even here the "Linux in JS" effort is by a hobbyist specializing in embedded script engine development. This particular stunt might not push anything forward but their own expertise - or passion. Which is where world pushes come from.
Scrubbing a floor with a toothbrush is hazing partly because it's been done before, which makes it even more pointless - and so more tedious. "Linux in JS" is new, and so less pointless. Even if it is a terrible tool for running Linux. It's a pretty good tool for exercising the imagination, and the skills and commitment to back them up.
Because they're a geek.
And you're not. Why are you reading Slashdot, let alone posting to it? Poser.