The menus basically have to be where they are now, because old photographers expect the MS-DOS menu experience
"Have to be"? Baloney. They don't have to be anything. Who gives a shit what the old timers expect. Give them something better than what they expect. The camera manufacturers have just been lazy and can't be bothered to invest the money into designing a decent interface because they know theirs is as "good" as anyone else's and they have people locked to their platform via hardware.
That argument is the "that's the way we've always done it" argument which drives me absolutely bananas. If they had tried a bunch of stuff and that proved to be what worked best then fine but they haven't done that. NOBODY has done that. They just do a minor iteration on an interface from the 1990s that wasn't good then and still isn't good.
And, for reals, out in the field that paradigm is often the one that works best.
How would you know? Nobody has tried anything different. It works but that doesn't make it good, efficient, or pleasant to use. Camera companies trap photographers to their line of hardware and so they don't need to care that the software interface is shit since they know they aren't going to change platforms.
As for the colour scheme, I guess it's for readablity under adverse conditions (pouring rain).
Beyond whatever is necessary for function I couldn't give a tinker's damn about the color scheme.
Have they made changes to the 1980's menu system for example?
That would be shocking if someone actually fixed that problem. I have yet to run across a camera menu (Canon or otherwise) system that doesn't make my eyes bleed. While I'm not a pro photographer by any means I've handled enough cameras across enough brands to realize the menus are pretty much universally shit. Just horribly designed with terrible interfaces. Buried settings with little rhyme or reason to them, clumsy navigation, poor descriptors, idiotic menu choices, etc. I'm not looking for pretty - just efficient and functional. Haven't found one I like yet. The cameras I've tried haven't nailed the collaboration with smartphones, tablets or PCs either. You can get them to talk but it's super clumsy and annoying. That should be basic by now but they haven't figured it out.
I see someone's dealt with Apple's "support". It's never Apple's problem. It's always "you're doing it wrong".
Hogwash. I've had two iPhones replaced by Apple in the last 5 years. One for cracked screen - small crack in upper right corner they indicated was a known design issue, replaced for free. The other was for a camera that wouldn't focus for some reason, also replaced for free under warranty. I'm under no illusions that if I threw my phone on the ground or dropped it in the toilet that they would replace it for free (that would be my fault) but they've been nothing but courteous and helpful when I've needed it. They asked if I had dropped the phone but when I answered no they did not pursue the matter further. I've never once heard an Apple representative tell anyone "you're doing it wrong" *in person* and I'm quite confident you haven't either.
That alone is why I'm done trying to deal with Apple. The high prices and poor quality just further cement that decision.
High prices? Sure. Poor quality? There are a lot of things I could critique about Apple's but as a general proposition hardware quality is not among them. They are well made and widely acknowledged even by their competition to be well made.
And soon to be a fifth, all in under two years. This last one only lasted about three weeks.
If indeed that is true I think the problem is most likely you, or more accurately something you are doing. While Apple does have issues with devices from time to time, the probability of a single person have 5 failed iPhones in two years due to (conveniently unspecified) quality problems is remote to say the least. I've known of people to break that many phones in a similarly short time span but that was a user error problem. If there was evidence of Apple having widespread quality issues I'd be the first to pile on but I just don't see the evidence for it here.
You talk as though there was one government instead of a lot of somewhat disjointed agencies and departments.
Shorthand way of communicating the concept. Most people understand this just fine. It's a part of the government and they are trying to do something to make their life easier at the expense of civil liberties. If another part of the government fails to stop them (like Congress or the President or the Secretary of Homeland Security) then they are tacitly endorsing the actions of this agency.
And those are separate from Congress and the Judiciary.
Of course they are. US Customs is a part of the Dept of Homeland Security. But it IS a government agency and therefore referring to it as "the government" is entirely accurate if a tad sloppy. It is entirely within the power of Congress to stop these actions. If Congress fails to do so then Congress is endorsing these actions so in that sense the government is effectively a single entity.
How would they prevent people from using sanitized "fake" accounts? Seems a pretty obvious work-around.
The point would be that if you lied about it and they find out later they have extra ammunition to prosecute you with. Basically either you give up private information or they charge you with perjury if they catch you hiding information. Either way you lose.
They say this plan "would unfairly violate the privacy of innocent travelers," would cause "innocent travelers"...
I'd say that is EXACTLY the point of the idea if indeed they are actually doing this. Our government is most likely not quite that stupid even though sometimes they make a strong effort to prove me wrong. The vast majority of the time they invoke "terrorists" what they are really doing is finding ways to put their boot on the throats of normal citizens. The more subjugated the citizens are the easier it is for them to get what they want. Crime investigators see the constitution and civil rights as obstacles to be brushed aside instead of valuable protections.
I would equally ask what's wrong with you that you wouldn't enjoy being behind the wheel of an exciting car, even in traffic
Doesn't matter what kind of car it is if I'm stuck in traffic. I've owned a number of fast fun cars. Still boring as shit in traffic. They're only fun when you can actually use them to some significant percentage of their potential. What is the point in owning a fast Mercedes when you cannot drive it faster than the posted speed limit on a congested road? Drag race between stoplights? Maybe that's fun when you are a teenager. Cool looking car? That's the outside and I don't get to look at it. Great handling? Useless on my daily commute unless I'm avoiding an accident.
Would I buy a Model S or a Nissan GT-R if I had the funds? Sure. But for my daily commute there would be little entertainment value in them. They're only really fun when you can thrash them a bit and go around some bends at butt puckering speeds.
Some of us actually do enjoy driving, track/race and are quite good at it.
That's a far different thing from 99.9999% of the driving most of us do. I get to drive roughly 60 minutes per day for my commute round trip. There is nothing enjoyable about the drive and changing to an exciting car wouldn't make it more exciting. If my commute is something you would find fun then I would wonder what is wrong with you. The vast majority of my driving time is a waste of my life. It is unproductive, boring, occasionally dangerous, polluting and wasteful. Sure getting behind the wheel of a fast car on a track is a blast but very little driving even remotely fits that description.
Probably varies by service. There are services that will have a human transcribe the email if it is a particular problem. If someone has to work on the phone a lot that might be a worthwhile investment.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
Most people can talk at 110-150 wpm. My wife is an MD and she also is a fast typist (>100wpm). In most cases it is faster for her to use a transcription service than to type it herself. Most people can talk significantly faster than they can type and that even includes those proficient with a keyboard. On a phone it's no contest at all. Not to mention that lugging around a full sized keyboard everywhere you go is more than slightly inconvenient.
Forced listening to the boss' 10 minute diatribe? No thanks. Give me a transcript instead.
Agreed but getting a transcript is easier than you might think. I'd stick a screwdriver in my ear before I'd listen to voicemails but I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically. I can still listen to it if there is a good reason to but I almost never do. Plenty of services that do this (Google Voice, Youmail, etc). I've been using it for years and it works great.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't included something like this in their "visual voicemail". It's fast to dictate a message but comparatively slow to listen to one. It's fast to read a message but slow to write one. So a voice memo that gets transcribed can be a good thing in the right circumstances.
The Hindenburg was merely the most spectacular airship disaster. It was FAR from the only one.
So, the answer here is to try hydrogen again as a lift gas, not to abandon it due to a minor accident caused by paint.
You seem rather fixated on a single accident. Airships fell out of favor because they routinely blew up, crashed, can't handle bad weather, burned, etc in addition to being economically noncompetitive and comparatively slow. I disagree that the Hindenburg was a "minor accident". Nothing that kills 35 people is a minor accident. If that was the only accident ever then perhaps you would have a point but it wasn't the only accident or even close to it.
Airships fell out of favor for a variety of practical reasons as well. Their power to weight ratio and specific fuel consumption prior to WWII was competitive for long distance operations but since then rigid wing aircraft have surpassed airships for most practical applications.
Could hydrogen be used safely as a lifting gas? I can't categorically say no but you'll have to provide a LOT better evidence than "technology has improved since the Hindenburg". At this time there is no credible reason to believe the safety problems inherent to using hydrogen as a lifting gas have been solved.
The supply of hydrogen is limited on Earth also but since it's the most abundant element in the universe it isn't a big deal
The supply of hydrogen on earth is effectively unlimited. We have literally oceans of it plus vast amounts of hydrocarbons as well. Compared to the amount of helium available economically to us we have all the hydrogen we are ever likely to need.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe... So meh.
Doesn't matter how abundant it is if you can't get it economically.
Hydrogen is cheaper and more abundant, but because of one minor setback 80 years ago the idea has been senselessly abandoned.
You have a very curious definition of "one minor setback".
Imagine the same principle was applied to other aircraft and we abandoned the whole idea as soon as one thing went wrong
The problems with other aircraft had solutions. The problem of using highly flammable hydrogen gas is an irreducible hazard. Helium can work as a substitute but our supply is limited on Earth and getting more will be expensive.
Engineering and design methods have improved considerably in 80 years, and we could now likely make a very safe hydrogen airship, but people have an unfounded fear of the idea.
Really? We've solved the problem of hydrogen gas being highly flammable? When did that happen?
I have been on both sides as well as having a front row seat to many companies struggling after a "rockstar" MBA CEO pumped up short term profits at the expense of long term viability.
I can show you even more examples of individuals who never went to business school doing EXACTLY the same thing.
While there are many good MBAs out there, many who were originally engineers, there are also many bad MBAs out there, primarily those who are only MBAs.
MBA is a degree. There is no such thing as a person who is "only MBA". Every one of them has an undergraduate degree in something and most people who earn that degree have several years of experience before they get it. Often business but more often something else. My class had people who had undergrad degrees in film, sociology, engineering, various sciences, IT, medicine, and lots more. There were of course finance, accounting and marketing majors too. We had a few professional athletes as well. All but a handful had at least 4-5 years working experience prior to B-school. I worked as an engineer prior to and after B-school.
The continual parade of once proud tech companies whose CEO chooses to fire half the company and outsource to China and then golden parachutes in 5 or 6 years just before the company crashes and burns after $20M a year bonuses for record profits is virtually unending and very damaging to the workforce and the country as a whole. This sociopathic behavior performed exclusively by MBAs is destroying the country one company at a time.
Complete load of crap that what you describe is "performed exclusively by MBAs". Demonstrably untrue. Some people with a corporate raider mentality have a MBA degree. Many others do not. Having an MBA does not make one a corporate raider any more than having an engineering degree makes one an autistic introvert.
This would force management to discontinue the sociopathic slash and burn corporate raider mentality.
No it wouldn't. It would just change where they do it from and how they do it. They would start basing companies outside the US or change the type of payment or pull other shenanigans. I don't have a problem in principle with your ideas about aligning management pay with long term corporate prosperity but there is no silver bullet on that. It's pretty hard to legislate morality.
Robotic assembly lines make it relatively easy and quick to switch on production of just about anything requiring mass quantities. Scaling up is easier with robotics.
Speaking as someone who has spent a fair bit of time working with robotic assembly lines, I think you are overestimating the plug-and-play nature of them severely. Mass production does not require robots nor is it particularly made easier by their presence. The advantages of robots are that they can work in hazardous environments, they can lower unit costs in some (not all) cases by reducing labor costs, they can produce repeatable products, and they sometimes can work faster. Downsides include: High up front tooling costs, less flexible than humans, require substantial programming time/expertise, too expensive for low-medium volume, maintenance and repair, and high setup costs.
As a general proposition scaling up is not any easier with robotics than with people and generally not any faster either. In some cases it can actually be more difficult. There are advantages to automation but ease of scaling is generally not one of them.
OTOH, having a competent older doc around is often a life saver. Experience counts in this field.
Sometimes true, sometimes not so much. Experience only helps if it is a good practice and relevant. I've seen first hand older doctors who haven't done a good job keeping up with the state of the art in their specialty. My wife's sub-specialty didn't even exist until about 20-30 years ago. Doctors over the age of 60 do not have any special certifications or training in it and there has been considerable advancement since they received their training. I can tell you from first hand observations that not all of them have done a good job keeping up with current best practices.
Same as in engineering. It's useful to have an adult in the room at times.
Sometimes the "adult" is the one who is younger in years.
Actually that is only true for corporations, true small businesses generally do have loyalty to their employees, its hard not to when the owner knows the employees and their families.
I've spent the majority of my career working with small business. Sometimes the small business owners are loyal, sometimes not so much. I've seen extremes of both and everything in between. In many cases they have little choice but to be loyal because in a small company it can be hard to replace someone even if they are flawed somehow. I've also seen owners who would fire someone if they so much as looked at them cross-eyed.
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college.
There are substantial efforts to replace physicians with RNs and other lower paid workers. Some appropriate, others not so much. Some physician jobs like radiology face possible competition from off shore radiologists in places like India with lower wages since that job does not require the presence of the patient.
And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...
Umm, that is a thing too. My wife works in a practice where the oldest doctor was trained in an earlier era and much of his training is not considered obsolete. And it shows in his work. Older doctors don't always do a great job of keeping up with best practices and the latest methods.
As am I. I went to business school concurrently with my engineering masters to learn how to better manage the projects I work on. Frankly there are a lot of bitter engineers here on Slashdot that are looking for a scapegoat for what they perceive (sometimes rightly) as injustices in the workplace. Blaming "MBAs" is their modern version of blaming Jews or moneylenders as an easily demonized group that in reality has little or nothing to do with the actual problems. It's just tribal scapegoating. There are just as many incompetent engineers as there are incompetent business majors. I run into both almost daily.
I treat anyone who blames "MBAs" with a sort of corollary to Godwin's law. As a discussion progresses the probability of some idiot scapegoating "MBAs" for a problem approaches 1. If they blame MBAs for a problem they no longer have a reasoned argument to make based on actual facts and so they lose the argument and the discussion is over.
Nothing in my studies ever suggested to cut corners for short term profits. It was focused on long term growth strategies and employee development. To remain globally competitive you have to build from within.
This is 100% true. I remember several case studies being used to highlight the dangers of seeking short term profits through financial engineering. The professors took substantial pains to show how short term profit seeking will often backfire long term and damage a company.
The companies that are off shoring functions will most likely find themselves in more trouble a few years down the road.
I've actually done some work in global sourcing and I can confirm this anecdotally. Offshoring tends to result in all sorts of management headaches and quality problems. Send work to China and you'd better have someone actually in China to keep an eye on things. I had a client some years ago who blew up their supply chain and sent work all over the place and only then realized that it caused all sorts of quality, logistics and lead time problems. Not to mention that shipping parts halfway around the world often eats away much of the savings.
Because in Latin America, it is very common to hire somebody that seems to be totally qualified for something, and then it turns out they really did not know their stuff that well.
You would think for something like the Olympics they might be able to dig up someone who knows how to treat a swimming poll correctly. You would thing FINA might have had the topic come up once or twice.
I also think the Olympic Committee should have a way to make a country lose the right to host, if things are not ready like 2 months before or something. So that when a host is selected, a backup host with a country that has most of the stuff ready can be selected.
Why would any country agree to be a backup host? They're supposed to spend millions of dollars getting ready for an event that will probably never happen? It's not like the IOC would pay for it. And realistically there really is maybe 2-3 countries who could host something the scale of the Olympics on short notice. The US could do it most easily. Maybe a few countries in western Europe (UK, Germany, France). Maybe Russia or China. Canada for the winter games. But really there just aren't a lot of places with the infrastructure in place already and I can't see them agreeing to the hassle realistically.
I think what really should happen is that there should either be a permanent home for the Olympics (how about Greece?) or a rotating set of cities with already established infrastructure. Spending billions that will never be recouped on a one time sporting event is idiotic.
This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price.
Or it's an actual business necessity to keep the company in good shape going forward. Sometimes layoffs are a business necessity. If Cisco is getting out of a line of business or the strategic direction has changed it would be idiotic to keep the people employed despite having nothing economically useful for them to do.
Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
Announcing mass layoffs is generally a very poor way to accomplish that. It usually results in short term reductions in profits, a near term drop in stock price, and substantial productivity and moral problems in the remaining workforce.
Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software and yet we will dump money into these programs to train the next generation, and hiring H1-B workers instead.
Why do you presume they could or even would want to be trained to be software developers? Even if they could be trained (at substantial cost no doubt) that doesn't imply that they would be particularly competent. Just because someone works for a tech company doesn't mean they are an engineer. While Cisco no doubt has thousands of engineers they also have people who are accountants, marketing, sales, logistics, and every other task you can think of. It is doubtful that many of those people actually would want to become software developers.
You know these people are likely intelligent and could use the leg up to fill the gaps the company has, and instead it is just dump them on the street.
Why do you assume the company has 14,000 unfilled positions? If they are getting rid of that many people they don't have 14,000 economically valuable jobs available for them. Hiring people when you don't have a useful role for them is a one way ticket to bankruptcy. Even if Cisco wanted to train them, it usually takes YEARS to become competent in another line of work. You don't learn to be a good programmer or a good accountant or a good sales person in just 3 months.
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own.
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained
It's adorable that you think companies ever did have loyalty to workers. Companies exist to make money. If loyalty to workers will most efficiently achieve that end then they will be loyal but it's unreasonable to expect such accommodation. People can be retrained but not necessarily for jobs the company has available. Frequently it is better in the long run for both the company and the worker to part ways. If my company came to me and said "you can keep your job if you retrain yourself to be a software engineer", I'd say thanks for the offer but I'll go succeed elsewhere because I have zero interest in doing that for a living.
Brazil has nice big beaches, full of topless chicks, covering up their butts with shoestring bikinis. Why would anyone want to go to a pool at all . . . ?
Because last time I checked they weren't handing out Olympic diving medals on the beach. I'm pretty sure the "topless chicks" are not much of a draw to the female divers or the gay male divers so there's that too...
Slashdot Mirror
The menus basically have to be where they are now, because old photographers expect the MS-DOS menu experience
"Have to be"? Baloney. They don't have to be anything. Who gives a shit what the old timers expect. Give them something better than what they expect. The camera manufacturers have just been lazy and can't be bothered to invest the money into designing a decent interface because they know theirs is as "good" as anyone else's and they have people locked to their platform via hardware.
That argument is the "that's the way we've always done it" argument which drives me absolutely bananas. If they had tried a bunch of stuff and that proved to be what worked best then fine but they haven't done that. NOBODY has done that. They just do a minor iteration on an interface from the 1990s that wasn't good then and still isn't good.
And, for reals, out in the field that paradigm is often the one that works best.
How would you know? Nobody has tried anything different. It works but that doesn't make it good, efficient, or pleasant to use. Camera companies trap photographers to their line of hardware and so they don't need to care that the software interface is shit since they know they aren't going to change platforms.
As for the colour scheme, I guess it's for readablity under adverse conditions (pouring rain).
Beyond whatever is necessary for function I couldn't give a tinker's damn about the color scheme.
Have they made changes to the 1980's menu system for example?
That would be shocking if someone actually fixed that problem. I have yet to run across a camera menu (Canon or otherwise) system that doesn't make my eyes bleed. While I'm not a pro photographer by any means I've handled enough cameras across enough brands to realize the menus are pretty much universally shit. Just horribly designed with terrible interfaces. Buried settings with little rhyme or reason to them, clumsy navigation, poor descriptors, idiotic menu choices, etc. I'm not looking for pretty - just efficient and functional. Haven't found one I like yet. The cameras I've tried haven't nailed the collaboration with smartphones, tablets or PCs either. You can get them to talk but it's super clumsy and annoying. That should be basic by now but they haven't figured it out.
I see someone's dealt with Apple's "support". It's never Apple's problem. It's always "you're doing it wrong".
Hogwash. I've had two iPhones replaced by Apple in the last 5 years. One for cracked screen - small crack in upper right corner they indicated was a known design issue, replaced for free. The other was for a camera that wouldn't focus for some reason, also replaced for free under warranty. I'm under no illusions that if I threw my phone on the ground or dropped it in the toilet that they would replace it for free (that would be my fault) but they've been nothing but courteous and helpful when I've needed it. They asked if I had dropped the phone but when I answered no they did not pursue the matter further. I've never once heard an Apple representative tell anyone "you're doing it wrong" *in person* and I'm quite confident you haven't either.
That alone is why I'm done trying to deal with Apple. The high prices and poor quality just further cement that decision.
High prices? Sure. Poor quality? There are a lot of things I could critique about Apple's but as a general proposition hardware quality is not among them. They are well made and widely acknowledged even by their competition to be well made.
And soon to be a fifth, all in under two years. This last one only lasted about three weeks.
If indeed that is true I think the problem is most likely you, or more accurately something you are doing. While Apple does have issues with devices from time to time, the probability of a single person have 5 failed iPhones in two years due to (conveniently unspecified) quality problems is remote to say the least. I've known of people to break that many phones in a similarly short time span but that was a user error problem. If there was evidence of Apple having widespread quality issues I'd be the first to pile on but I just don't see the evidence for it here.
You talk as though there was one government instead of a lot of somewhat disjointed agencies and departments.
Shorthand way of communicating the concept. Most people understand this just fine. It's a part of the government and they are trying to do something to make their life easier at the expense of civil liberties. If another part of the government fails to stop them (like Congress or the President or the Secretary of Homeland Security) then they are tacitly endorsing the actions of this agency.
And those are separate from Congress and the Judiciary.
Of course they are. US Customs is a part of the Dept of Homeland Security. But it IS a government agency and therefore referring to it as "the government" is entirely accurate if a tad sloppy. It is entirely within the power of Congress to stop these actions. If Congress fails to do so then Congress is endorsing these actions so in that sense the government is effectively a single entity.
How would they prevent people from using sanitized "fake" accounts? Seems a pretty obvious work-around.
The point would be that if you lied about it and they find out later they have extra ammunition to prosecute you with. Basically either you give up private information or they charge you with perjury if they catch you hiding information. Either way you lose.
that it's possible that someone doesn't have twitter and/or facebook?
Probably they would regard it as proof that such a person (like me) is a terrorist looking to hide something...
They say this plan "would unfairly violate the privacy of innocent travelers," would cause "innocent travelers"...
I'd say that is EXACTLY the point of the idea if indeed they are actually doing this. Our government is most likely not quite that stupid even though sometimes they make a strong effort to prove me wrong. The vast majority of the time they invoke "terrorists" what they are really doing is finding ways to put their boot on the throats of normal citizens. The more subjugated the citizens are the easier it is for them to get what they want. Crime investigators see the constitution and civil rights as obstacles to be brushed aside instead of valuable protections.
I would equally ask what's wrong with you that you wouldn't enjoy being behind the wheel of an exciting car, even in traffic
Doesn't matter what kind of car it is if I'm stuck in traffic. I've owned a number of fast fun cars. Still boring as shit in traffic. They're only fun when you can actually use them to some significant percentage of their potential. What is the point in owning a fast Mercedes when you cannot drive it faster than the posted speed limit on a congested road? Drag race between stoplights? Maybe that's fun when you are a teenager. Cool looking car? That's the outside and I don't get to look at it. Great handling? Useless on my daily commute unless I'm avoiding an accident.
Would I buy a Model S or a Nissan GT-R if I had the funds? Sure. But for my daily commute there would be little entertainment value in them. They're only really fun when you can thrash them a bit and go around some bends at butt puckering speeds.
Some of us actually do enjoy driving, track/race and are quite good at it.
That's a far different thing from 99.9999% of the driving most of us do. I get to drive roughly 60 minutes per day for my commute round trip. There is nothing enjoyable about the drive and changing to an exciting car wouldn't make it more exciting. If my commute is something you would find fun then I would wonder what is wrong with you. The vast majority of my driving time is a waste of my life. It is unproductive, boring, occasionally dangerous, polluting and wasteful. Sure getting behind the wheel of a fast car on a track is a blast but very little driving even remotely fits that description.
How does it handle "international" accents?
Probably varies by service. There are services that will have a human transcribe the email if it is a particular problem. If someone has to work on the phone a lot that might be a worthwhile investment.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
Most people can talk at 110-150 wpm. My wife is an MD and she also is a fast typist (>100wpm). In most cases it is faster for her to use a transcription service than to type it herself. Most people can talk significantly faster than they can type and that even includes those proficient with a keyboard. On a phone it's no contest at all. Not to mention that lugging around a full sized keyboard everywhere you go is more than slightly inconvenient.
Forced listening to the boss' 10 minute diatribe? No thanks. Give me a transcript instead.
Agreed but getting a transcript is easier than you might think. I'd stick a screwdriver in my ear before I'd listen to voicemails but I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically. I can still listen to it if there is a good reason to but I almost never do. Plenty of services that do this (Google Voice, Youmail, etc). I've been using it for years and it works great.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't included something like this in their "visual voicemail". It's fast to dictate a message but comparatively slow to listen to one. It's fast to read a message but slow to write one. So a voice memo that gets transcribed can be a good thing in the right circumstances.
If you're referring to the Hindenburg...
The Hindenburg was merely the most spectacular airship disaster. It was FAR from the only one.
So, the answer here is to try hydrogen again as a lift gas, not to abandon it due to a minor accident caused by paint.
You seem rather fixated on a single accident. Airships fell out of favor because they routinely blew up, crashed, can't handle bad weather, burned, etc in addition to being economically noncompetitive and comparatively slow. I disagree that the Hindenburg was a "minor accident". Nothing that kills 35 people is a minor accident. If that was the only accident ever then perhaps you would have a point but it wasn't the only accident or even close to it.
Airships fell out of favor for a variety of practical reasons as well. Their power to weight ratio and specific fuel consumption prior to WWII was competitive for long distance operations but since then rigid wing aircraft have surpassed airships for most practical applications.
Could hydrogen be used safely as a lifting gas? I can't categorically say no but you'll have to provide a LOT better evidence than "technology has improved since the Hindenburg". At this time there is no credible reason to believe the safety problems inherent to using hydrogen as a lifting gas have been solved.
The supply of hydrogen is limited on Earth also but since it's the most abundant element in the universe it isn't a big deal
The supply of hydrogen on earth is effectively unlimited. We have literally oceans of it plus vast amounts of hydrocarbons as well. Compared to the amount of helium available economically to us we have all the hydrogen we are ever likely to need.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe... So meh.
Doesn't matter how abundant it is if you can't get it economically.
Hydrogen is cheaper and more abundant, but because of one minor setback 80 years ago the idea has been senselessly abandoned.
You have a very curious definition of "one minor setback".
Imagine the same principle was applied to other aircraft and we abandoned the whole idea as soon as one thing went wrong
The problems with other aircraft had solutions. The problem of using highly flammable hydrogen gas is an irreducible hazard. Helium can work as a substitute but our supply is limited on Earth and getting more will be expensive.
Engineering and design methods have improved considerably in 80 years, and we could now likely make a very safe hydrogen airship, but people have an unfounded fear of the idea.
Really? We've solved the problem of hydrogen gas being highly flammable? When did that happen?
I have been on both sides as well as having a front row seat to many companies struggling after a "rockstar" MBA CEO pumped up short term profits at the expense of long term viability.
I can show you even more examples of individuals who never went to business school doing EXACTLY the same thing.
While there are many good MBAs out there, many who were originally engineers, there are also many bad MBAs out there, primarily those who are only MBAs.
MBA is a degree. There is no such thing as a person who is "only MBA". Every one of them has an undergraduate degree in something and most people who earn that degree have several years of experience before they get it. Often business but more often something else. My class had people who had undergrad degrees in film, sociology, engineering, various sciences, IT, medicine, and lots more. There were of course finance, accounting and marketing majors too. We had a few professional athletes as well. All but a handful had at least 4-5 years working experience prior to B-school. I worked as an engineer prior to and after B-school.
The continual parade of once proud tech companies whose CEO chooses to fire half the company and outsource to China and then golden parachutes in 5 or 6 years just before the company crashes and burns after $20M a year bonuses for record profits is virtually unending and very damaging to the workforce and the country as a whole. This sociopathic behavior performed exclusively by MBAs is destroying the country one company at a time.
Complete load of crap that what you describe is "performed exclusively by MBAs". Demonstrably untrue. Some people with a corporate raider mentality have a MBA degree. Many others do not. Having an MBA does not make one a corporate raider any more than having an engineering degree makes one an autistic introvert.
This would force management to discontinue the sociopathic slash and burn corporate raider mentality.
No it wouldn't. It would just change where they do it from and how they do it. They would start basing companies outside the US or change the type of payment or pull other shenanigans. I don't have a problem in principle with your ideas about aligning management pay with long term corporate prosperity but there is no silver bullet on that. It's pretty hard to legislate morality.
Robotic assembly lines make it relatively easy and quick to switch on production of just about anything requiring mass quantities. Scaling up is easier with robotics.
Speaking as someone who has spent a fair bit of time working with robotic assembly lines, I think you are overestimating the plug-and-play nature of them severely. Mass production does not require robots nor is it particularly made easier by their presence. The advantages of robots are that they can work in hazardous environments, they can lower unit costs in some (not all) cases by reducing labor costs, they can produce repeatable products, and they sometimes can work faster. Downsides include: High up front tooling costs, less flexible than humans, require substantial programming time/expertise, too expensive for low-medium volume, maintenance and repair, and high setup costs.
As a general proposition scaling up is not any easier with robotics than with people and generally not any faster either. In some cases it can actually be more difficult. There are advantages to automation but ease of scaling is generally not one of them.
OTOH, having a competent older doc around is often a life saver. Experience counts in this field.
Sometimes true, sometimes not so much. Experience only helps if it is a good practice and relevant. I've seen first hand older doctors who haven't done a good job keeping up with the state of the art in their specialty. My wife's sub-specialty didn't even exist until about 20-30 years ago. Doctors over the age of 60 do not have any special certifications or training in it and there has been considerable advancement since they received their training. I can tell you from first hand observations that not all of them have done a good job keeping up with current best practices.
Same as in engineering. It's useful to have an adult in the room at times.
Sometimes the "adult" is the one who is younger in years.
Actually that is only true for corporations, true small businesses generally do have loyalty to their employees, its hard not to when the owner knows the employees and their families.
I've spent the majority of my career working with small business. Sometimes the small business owners are loyal, sometimes not so much. I've seen extremes of both and everything in between. In many cases they have little choice but to be loyal because in a small company it can be hard to replace someone even if they are flawed somehow. I've also seen owners who would fire someone if they so much as looked at them cross-eyed.
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college.
There are substantial efforts to replace physicians with RNs and other lower paid workers. Some appropriate, others not so much. Some physician jobs like radiology face possible competition from off shore radiologists in places like India with lower wages since that job does not require the presence of the patient.
And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...
Umm, that is a thing too. My wife works in a practice where the oldest doctor was trained in an earlier era and much of his training is not considered obsolete. And it shows in his work. Older doctors don't always do a great job of keeping up with best practices and the latest methods.
I'm an engineer with an MBA.
As am I. I went to business school concurrently with my engineering masters to learn how to better manage the projects I work on. Frankly there are a lot of bitter engineers here on Slashdot that are looking for a scapegoat for what they perceive (sometimes rightly) as injustices in the workplace. Blaming "MBAs" is their modern version of blaming Jews or moneylenders as an easily demonized group that in reality has little or nothing to do with the actual problems. It's just tribal scapegoating. There are just as many incompetent engineers as there are incompetent business majors. I run into both almost daily.
I treat anyone who blames "MBAs" with a sort of corollary to Godwin's law. As a discussion progresses the probability of some idiot scapegoating "MBAs" for a problem approaches 1. If they blame MBAs for a problem they no longer have a reasoned argument to make based on actual facts and so they lose the argument and the discussion is over.
Nothing in my studies ever suggested to cut corners for short term profits. It was focused on long term growth strategies and employee development. To remain globally competitive you have to build from within.
This is 100% true. I remember several case studies being used to highlight the dangers of seeking short term profits through financial engineering. The professors took substantial pains to show how short term profit seeking will often backfire long term and damage a company.
The companies that are off shoring functions will most likely find themselves in more trouble a few years down the road.
I've actually done some work in global sourcing and I can confirm this anecdotally. Offshoring tends to result in all sorts of management headaches and quality problems. Send work to China and you'd better have someone actually in China to keep an eye on things. I had a client some years ago who blew up their supply chain and sent work all over the place and only then realized that it caused all sorts of quality, logistics and lead time problems. Not to mention that shipping parts halfway around the world often eats away much of the savings.
Because in Latin America, it is very common to hire somebody that seems to be totally qualified for something, and then it turns out they really did not know their stuff that well.
You would think for something like the Olympics they might be able to dig up someone who knows how to treat a swimming poll correctly. You would thing FINA might have had the topic come up once or twice.
I also think the Olympic Committee should have a way to make a country lose the right to host, if things are not ready like 2 months before or something. So that when a host is selected, a backup host with a country that has most of the stuff ready can be selected.
Why would any country agree to be a backup host? They're supposed to spend millions of dollars getting ready for an event that will probably never happen? It's not like the IOC would pay for it. And realistically there really is maybe 2-3 countries who could host something the scale of the Olympics on short notice. The US could do it most easily. Maybe a few countries in western Europe (UK, Germany, France). Maybe Russia or China. Canada for the winter games. But really there just aren't a lot of places with the infrastructure in place already and I can't see them agreeing to the hassle realistically.
I think what really should happen is that there should either be a permanent home for the Olympics (how about Greece?) or a rotating set of cities with already established infrastructure. Spending billions that will never be recouped on a one time sporting event is idiotic.
This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price.
Or it's an actual business necessity to keep the company in good shape going forward. Sometimes layoffs are a business necessity. If Cisco is getting out of a line of business or the strategic direction has changed it would be idiotic to keep the people employed despite having nothing economically useful for them to do.
Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
Announcing mass layoffs is generally a very poor way to accomplish that. It usually results in short term reductions in profits, a near term drop in stock price, and substantial productivity and moral problems in the remaining workforce.
Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software and yet we will dump money into these programs to train the next generation, and hiring H1-B workers instead.
Why do you presume they could or even would want to be trained to be software developers? Even if they could be trained (at substantial cost no doubt) that doesn't imply that they would be particularly competent. Just because someone works for a tech company doesn't mean they are an engineer. While Cisco no doubt has thousands of engineers they also have people who are accountants, marketing, sales, logistics, and every other task you can think of. It is doubtful that many of those people actually would want to become software developers.
You know these people are likely intelligent and could use the leg up to fill the gaps the company has, and instead it is just dump them on the street.
Why do you assume the company has 14,000 unfilled positions? If they are getting rid of that many people they don't have 14,000 economically valuable jobs available for them. Hiring people when you don't have a useful role for them is a one way ticket to bankruptcy. Even if Cisco wanted to train them, it usually takes YEARS to become competent in another line of work. You don't learn to be a good programmer or a good accountant or a good sales person in just 3 months.
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own.
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained
It's adorable that you think companies ever did have loyalty to workers. Companies exist to make money. If loyalty to workers will most efficiently achieve that end then they will be loyal but it's unreasonable to expect such accommodation. People can be retrained but not necessarily for jobs the company has available. Frequently it is better in the long run for both the company and the worker to part ways. If my company came to me and said "you can keep your job if you retrain yourself to be a software engineer", I'd say thanks for the offer but I'll go succeed elsewhere because I have zero interest in doing that for a living.
Brazil has nice big beaches, full of topless chicks, covering up their butts with shoestring bikinis. Why would anyone want to go to a pool at all . . . ?
Because last time I checked they weren't handing out Olympic diving medals on the beach. I'm pretty sure the "topless chicks" are not much of a draw to the female divers or the gay male divers so there's that too...