Granted you kid getting access to your phone is often embarrassing, but if one of your coworkers or your boss or a stranger gets access to it it could be devastating.
If your coworkers getting access to your phone results in significant embarrassment I have to ask what on earth you are doing that you should be so embarrassed about. Yes it would be a problem but embarrassment should be pretty far down the list of worries if a coworker were to access your phone.
There is anxiety about automation displacing workers and in many cases, new digital tools allow one worker to do work previously done by several.
We are a species of tool makers. That is what tools do - they multiply our productivity. It's what tools have ALWAYS done. This is nothing new, especially since the industrial revolution. You WANT tools that multiply the productivity of people especially in a place like America which has 1/4 the population of China. Those tools (even for low skill workers) are what allow us to enjoy the high wages and standard of living we have. Don't like it? Too bad. The status quo is not an option and you don't want it to be either. If we go backwards that would be a problem FAR worse than any displacement of portions of the workforce that have been made redundant by technology.
Actually the 737 is just as modern as any aircraft being produced.
That depends on which 737 you are talking about. Some 737 have been in service for 30+ years so calling them modern is a bit of a stretch at this point. The 737 has been produced since the 1960s. Yes current versions are considerably updated and quite modern but there are still a lot of older models still in service that aren't nearly so up to date. There are plenty of 737s in service today that could fairly be described at this point as legacy aircraft. Boeing produces 300-400 new aircraft per year and there have been nearly 10,000 aircraft produced to date.
You did read at least the summary, right? 90% of the commercial fleet is the Boeing 737.
Evidently you did not read the summary. It says "legacy aircraft, which make up more than 90% of the commercial planes in the sky". It does not say the Boeing 737 is 90% of the fleet which obviously verified with a single trip to any airport. Boeing 737 are legacy aircraft and are common but there are a lot of other types of legacy aircraft as well.
In the era before the web, the forums on CompuServe were indispensable for everything from getting tech questions answered to chatting about movies.
Ok hands up if you even gave the briefest thought to CompuServe and their forums in the last 20 years. If you did you are the only one. Honestly I'm kind of shocked anyone was actually maintaining this stuff in any format.
Seriously, when you're being compared to notoriously expensive "cost-plus" contracts with (largely) military contractors, it's not hard to emerge as the cheaper option.
Cost plus contracts only make sense when the costs are difficult to ascertain at the time of quotation. When you are talking about something like the Apollo program, nobody really had any clear idea how much the whole thing would cost in advance because so much of it had never been done before. No sane private company would entertain such a deal unless the government was willing to absorb essentially all the risk. But at this point rockets aren't new technology so it should be reasonably straight forward to make a reasonable estimation of expected costs. (I'm a certified cost accountant in addition to being an engineer so I should know) Cost plus contracts for orbital lift services simply don't make sense anymore and the company that makes the rocket should have to experience some amount of risk.
Generally when a browser boasts of speed increases I sort of shrug because it's rarely obvious. Typically I'm more limited by the speed of the connection than by the browser processing speed. However this time it Firefox actually does appear to work notably faster. I'm not particularly impressed or offended by the visual changes but they are fine I guess. But I am actually (pleasantly) surprised to see how much quicker it works. I use Firefox as my primary browser so it's nice to see a change for the better. Hopefully nothing important broke in the process...
Really? What I took away was, "Look how much more efficient and effective private enterprise is!"
Private enterprise is NOT always more efficient or cheaper. Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good. Roads, policing, primary education, basic research, and many other necessary things that do not have a direct and relatively short term profit motive are difficult for private enterprise to do effectively or efficiently. The notion that private enterprise is always better is idiotic, false and counterproductive. Use private enterprise for what it is good at and government for what it is good at and have them work together when appropriate.
There is absolutely no way the Apollo program could have happened with private enterprise footing the bill. Private enterprise was useful to contract for specific tasks but it never would have happened if we'd let the Invisible Hand of the market do its thing. The Hubble Telescope would never have happened as a privately owned and operated device.
Authentication is predicated upon knowing a secret, which your face isn't
Authentication has nothing inherently to do with secrets. It's merely the act of proving you are who you say you are or verifying some other fact. In some cases secret information can aid in this or make it more dependable but most authentication is actually done with publicly available non-secret information. People recognize your face on a daily basis which is the most basic form of authentication. Sometimes it is useful to layer a secret passcode onto some item you possess or some bio-metric identifier but those merely enhance the confidence of the authentication.
If you aren't blowing things up now and then, you aren't on the frontier of exploration. You cannot know where the line designating the frontier is unless you occasionally step over it.
Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work.
This is a Good Thing. The need to staff a call center is a clear indication of a poorly functioning product or service. It means that some process or product has room to be made better. Call centers are necessary sometimes but really are a waste of human capital. I severely doubt that any near term AI is likely to do away with call centers any more than phone trees have. The better way to do that is to design a product or service that doesn't need the call center in the first place. Using AI to improve call centers pretty much is the most costly way to deal with the issue. Call centers should be a last resort.
There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai that helps train people on deep-learning technology, has some ideas for helping those in jobs he thinks will be automated, from call-center workers to radiologists, truck drivers, and the like.
Radiologists aren't going anywhere any time soon. Yes they have software to aid in diagnosis but that isn't going to get rid of the job - at most it will simply shift how they do it. There still will need to be a human in the loop for quite some time to come. Furthermore even if AI did supplant them, radiologists are MDs and are well trained to get started in a different specialty should the need arise. They'd have to do a new residency if they want to be a practicing doctor but that is all. Or there are countless other jobs (research, etc) which they are amply qualified for.
If someone's only skill is driving a vehicle then perhaps that person should consider educating themselves further.
You just might be the pointy-haired boss because studies show that productivity actually *increases* for those working from home.
Two points. 1) Citation please. Show me your evidence. I'm sure in some cases productivity does improve and in others it does not. I've seen both first hand. I've never seen any studies that prove widespread productivity increases due to working from home. 2) You COMPLETELY missed my point which is that most jobs CANNOT be done from home. Construction, restaurants, retail, manufacturing, warehousing, police, teaching, government, freight delivery, most medicine, and countless other jobs literally cannot be done from home. It is a small minority of work that can practically be done from home productively. Believe it or not there are jobs other than writing code in the world and they have different requirements to be productive.
THere is also a bunch of due diligence that is going to happen before it closes where Broadcom is going to get access to a lot of proprietary trade secret info.
That's not how due diligence on deals like this works unless one of the parties is thoroughly retarded. This is an unsolicited bid. They don't get to come in and examine everything just because they made an offer to buy. There would be verbiage in the buy/sell offer to allow verification of important details but trade secrets remain guarded until the deal closes. There also would be some non-disclosures with teeth and lots of lawyers involved on both sides.
If the deal fails because of regulators or any other reason then Broadcom walks away with a lot of Qualcomm secrets.
No they do not. And if they did there would be lots of flesh eating lawyers involved soon afterwards.
Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
It is a relatively rare job that can effectively and economically conduct all it's communication through IM and video chat. For example I am a manager at a manufacturing company. Our employees do not sit in front of computers writing code all day. If I worked from home I would effectively have near zero communication with my staff because they are busy making products. While I could do some engineering from home, a large chunk of my job would be impossible to do off site. Good luck telecommuting to a hospital or a restaurant or a retail store or fitness center.
There are some cases where telecommuting works great. There are many more where it simply doesn't work at all or doesn't work well. Even jobs that are compatible with telecommuting (like writing code) often find considerable added value in being co-located in the same building. A lot of people lose significant productivity when they aren't in an office and there is a surprising amount of administrative burden to managing a remote team.
Employing a Contract Manufacturer to do the soldering and assembly doesn't make you a "non-manufacturer" of your Hardware products.
Actually it does mean exactly that. Apple does not manufacture their products and has not for a long time. Therefore they are not a manufacturer by definition. Nothing wrong with that but you have to actually manufacture something to be called a manufacturer.
EVERYONE employs Contract Manufacturers. It's just a matter of economic efficiency, since the facilities and equipment are specialized and quite costly.
I am the GM for a (small) contract manufacturing company. I assure you I understand how it works better than you do. If you outsource 100% of your manufacturing then you are by definition not a manufacturer. Companies like Dell and HP contract out some production but they also make a substantial amount of their products themselves. Apple currently makes near as makes no difference none of their hardware nor do the assemble hardware made by others. The do design a lot of it but designing a product does not make one a manufacturer.
Unless you are a (very) high level accountant at Apple, I don't see how you could possibly know whether they are cooking the books or not. They're not going to publish anything egregiously wrong like claiming sales of 5 million iPhones in the Principality of Liechtenstein (pop. 37,000).
The simple fact is that it is plainly obvious that they are selling a LOT of iPhones and selling them at price points that are higher than most Android devices. Since they don't cost more to make then it's a pretty simple logical leap that their business model simply works.
No one predicted the collapse of Enron or RBS by looking at their published accounts.
Did you actually look at the financial statements of Enron? I did. They were the most (intentionally as it turned out) incomprehensible mountain of obfuscation you've ever read. They were written to be effectively incomprehensible even to experts at reading such financial statements. The signs were there and there were people pointing out the concerns even prior to the revelation that it was a huge fraud. Apple's financial statements (which I have also read) are NOTHING like Enron's. While they don't provide unlimited detail, they are pretty straight forward as these things go.
Sure Apple could in theory be covering up a fraud but you could say that about any company. The simple fact is that you have ZERO evidence to suggest Apple is doing anything other than selling a lot of product for a good margin. People love their products and it is clear that they are selling millions of them. Furthermore we can see their supply chain with reasonable clarity and all the evidence there backs up the thesis that they are moving a huge amount of product. If that strains your credulity then by all means provide us with a thesis and evidence with anything to back it up. Otherwise you are simply wasting our time.
Apple is in the business of selling hardware, not selling your data.
While it is undeniable that Apple does make money selling hardware, they aren't really a hardware company. They are a software company and this is something Steve Jobs understood a long time ago. They really make their money selling software. The hardware is simply the means by which they sell their software. The hardware on a Mac is in reality barely different from a Dell or HP computer. The iPhone hardware is barely different from numerous Android phones. Put Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone and customers would leave Apple faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit". The hardware is what facilitates the sale but what people really are buying is the software and that is what they pay a premium for.
Think of it this way. Companies keep the valuable parts of the business. Apple doesn't not manufacture hardware so hardware is obviously not the core of their business. They functions they kept in house are software development and hardware design. The hardware design is simply to facilitate selling the software by putting it in a pretty and well designed box.
And at least so far you are right that Apple does appear to in general be responsible with customer data and privacy. So far... And the reason they can do that is that they haven't needed to get into the ad business to maintain their margins. It's actually one of the reasons I have an iPhone instead of Android. It's not that I think the Android system is bad (it's better in many ways) but Google develops Android specifically so that they can continue to make money with their core advertising business which does not and cannot respect my privacy and data. It's a built in conflict of interest that is not in my favor. I'm actually willing to pay Apple a more to avoid that issue. Your mileage may vary of course.
That plus creating a premium experience translates to a device that people will pay a premium to get.
Correct. And the basis of that experience is software. If Apple sold their software through others they would probably look a lot like Microsoft in a best case scenario. Instead they are a little more vertically integrated to differentiate their products because operating systems tends to be a winner take all sort of business. Had they taken Microsoft's playbook probably one or the other of them would have died years ago. Had they taken the approach of selling hardware with someone else's software they would be nothing more than another me-too vendor of PCs even in the best case scenario and their margins would be a LOT thinner.
And yet, I recall the recent story about the engineer who lost his job and possibly his career because his daughter visited him at the office and took a naughty picture of a new iPhone. Seems like a somewhat evil prioritization of profits over people.
The engineer in question should have known that sharing that information was verboten. He almost certainly signed agreements to that effect. That engineer cut his own throat by disclosing trade secrets of his employer. ANY company in a similar position would have to do the same thing and that is the proper and responsible course of action. Otherwise they send a message that they don't really care about whether people disclose company secrets. We're not talking about some sort of toxic waste dump coverup here. We're talking about carelessly hurting the economic well being of the company and the people who depend on that company. He screwed up. He knows he screwed up. And he got fired for cause. You don't share secrets, even with family. He could easily have prevented the problem by not sharing the phone with his daughter who really is blameless. She was just an enthusiastic kid who got her hands on a new toy and behaved predictably like children do. That has nothing to do with prioritizing profits over people. Those profits actually support the livelihoods of many thousands of people and this idiot engineer needlessly endangered that.
I wonder what type of games they're playing with the books to make this happen.
Cute. I'm an accountant and I've seen zero evidence that Apple is cooking the books. Every indication is that they are simply moving a lot of product and getting very handsome margins on that product.
It's well known that without Jobs Apple has already started going into the meat grinder.
Someone should tell Apple because they are moving more product than ever and profits are UP. People have this bizarre notion that Apple should be releasing some new world changing technology every 18 months. If you look at their history they tend to have about one big idea every 10-15 years or so. The 70s was the Apple II. The 80s was the Mac. The 90s was the Newton (which flopped) and the Powerbook. The 2000s was the iPod and the most recent decade or so was the iPhone/iPad (which are the same device really). What will Apple do next? We should know in the next few years. In the mean time they are doing fine and there is little evidence to suggest they are in any danger of decline. Not to mention that they have a ludicrous amount of cash in the bank - enough to buy both Ford and GM outright in cash if they wanted to.
I have no doubt they can keep this up maybe for decades (Jobs did leave a bank of ideas) but Apple in the end is headed towards the toilet. Just like the last time Jobs left them.
While losing a visionary leader certainly is a big loss, there is no evidence to reflexively assume Apple is going to turn into a dumpster fire without him. Companies don't succeed or fail based on a single person. The question is how well Jobs did in succession planning and in setting up robust management systems. If Jobs did a good job of that then Apple will be fine just like other large successful companies. Part of the reason Apple struggled without him the first time is that they were still a rather young company in a new industry. A lot of the problems Apple had in the 80s and 90s were actually caused by Jobs. Jobs leaving the company probably made him a better leader than he would have been had he stayed.
That's my point. Not everyone at NASA is a rocket scientist. Some are regular administrators, managers, etc.
Those administrators aren't the ones deciding whether on not a printer would be useful on the space station. If anything I'm fairly confident they would try to keep one off the station to reduce costs if possible. They manage the budgets and might veto an idea but they would need the engineers thumbs up and cooperation to get a printer on the station. They use paper on the space station and I'm fairly confident they do so for good reasons. Remember that anything they send up there generally has to last for a long time. Paper doesn't have a power budget. There is the old saying that if you shoot a GPS with a bullet you have a piece of junk. Shoot a paper map with a bullet and you still have a map. Probably applies here too.
Now why they use an inkjet instead of a laser is an interesting question. I presume they had a good reason though I'm curious how often they have to replace the ink and what the relative launch costs would be. Lasers emit some fumes and the toner is a particulate that carries a charge so I'm guessing that played a role.
Seriously, e-paper tablets, even if they had to make/order a custom firmware for it, would be much better. Takes less room, less energy, doesn't need to be re-supplied with paper and ink.
And I'm sure you know what would work better in space than NASA does. The arrogance of a lot of slashdot posters seldom fails to amaze. Do you seriously think that no one at NASA is aware of what a tablet or e-paper is and that they haven't considered the idea? Why don't you find out why they do what they do with printers before you spout off that you know better than literal rocket scientists how to do their job.
This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING.
Evidently you are too young to actually work in a real office. Printers are about as far from dead as one can imagine. I personally print several thousand pages of documents every month. Work instructions, log sheets, customer orders, packing slips, and quite a lot more. I'm an engineer and the work instructions we send to our production floor are on paper. A tablet would be less useful, less flexible, and probably break quickly with the abuse it would take even if we disregard the fact that replacing paper would easily cost six figures in new hardware and custom software and it probably wouldn't result in anything better than what we have now.
Who prints photos anymore?
I do. Photography is a hobby of mine and I print some of the better pictures. Some for display and others to give to friends and family. Walk into any pharmacy and they do a pretty steady business in printing photos.
Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
No. No it does not. The software available for tablets isn't even remotely close to being usable enough, flexible enough, or cheap enough to replace paper. Paper is portable, cheap, flexible, reliable, and ubiquitous. Tablets are great tools in the right setting with the right software but there are countless jobs which lack usable software for a given task and even it it did exist it would be overkill. A tablet for a grocery list? No thanks.
towards elite rent seekers. Owners, not workers. Those folks don't risk anything.
Bullshit they don't risk anything. If you think that entrepreneurs don't risk anything then you've never tried to start or run a company. Owners of companies generally live a life of low grade terror because of the vast number of things that can go wrong and the amount of money they stand to lose.
Their loans are guaranteed, they've got insider information given verbally at country clubs, laws don't apply to them and if all else fails we've given them so much wealth that if they go down they take everything with them.
That's a quaint picture you have that has little correlation to reality for all but a tiny handful of business owners in rare cases. Go ahead and try to get an unsecured loan even if you have a lot of money. I've done it myself and been around plenty of others who have as well including some very wealthy people. It's very rare that you can get a loan without some form of collateral and/or personal guarantee. Even if you are already rich and successful.
STEM isn't going to get you out/up given the amount of outsourcing going on. Only the very brightest can overcome that barrier and not everybody can be a genius, if they could the definition of genius would change.
Who ever claimed that an engineering degree would protect you from globalism? Trying to pretend that global competition isn't a real thing is as absurd as pretending that the industrial revolution was a passing fad or that people will get over these computer things soon. You don't have to be a genius to compete in a global market. But you do have to be aware that the wages will not be set locally and protectionism will not save you.
If you're referencing that Chinese insult about living in interesting times though you're spot on. Between automation, general attacks on education in the form of funding cuts and our endless wars the working class is boned.
It's adorable that you think that. The problem the "working class" (and some white collar work too) in the US has is that in general they want wages that are well above the global average for equivalent work. If you are doing labor intensive work then that work is going to tend to migrate to where labor is cheap. When politicians pander to "bring back manufacturing jobs" what they are really promising is to lower wages to compete with the global prevailing wage. There are plenty of jobs. There might not be plenty of jobs wage levels near the top of the bell curve. Supply and demand. China and India have lots of labor so prices for that labor are relatively cheap. If you want higher than average wages then you had better have higher than average productivity too.
Uh, I was using more fully-featured smart phones years before the iPhone.
Nearly every smartphone since the iPhone has followed the iPhone template and the ones that haven't have failed to find customers. My statement stands You may have had phones with technically more "features" than the early iPhones but not usable ones in most cases. There was NOTHING before the iPhone that was worth a shit for browsing the web and they weren't well integrated devices. The Blackberry did email fairly well but not much else. Nokia was the leading smartphone maker at the time and their smartphones phones SUCKED to actually use. I know because I was using Nokia "smartphones" at the time - they technically had the features but good luck being productive with them. Microsoft's Windows phones were sort of slightly better versions of Palm devices but the interface still sucked. Microsoft was trying to cram desktop windows into a phone form factor and it never worked. Android hadn't really hit the scene yet and the other smartphones out there were more or less inconsequential and sucked.
The only thing they popularized was the touch screen and lack of buttons.
And the apps ecosystem. And multi-touch. And the form factor. And the music store. And MP3 player integration. And usable photo sharing. And google maps (first to use it) and Youtube on a mobile device. And Gorilla Glass. And actual usable web browsing on a smartphone. And virtual assistants (Siri). And visual voicemail. And Facetime. And more. If you think a touch screen and lack of buttons was all they did then you really aren't paying any attention. If you want to criticize Apple there is plenty to pick from but don't trot out that tired nonsense that all they did was round some corners. They weren't the only company doing innovative things but Apple was the company that found the winning formula for the modern smartphone. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality.
Everything else was 2 or 3 steps back from what Win Mo and Blackberry and others were doing.
Not even remotely. I think your recollection of that time period might be a little off. The iPhone basically killed both of those platforms in very short order because it was a better product overall. The early iPhones were competitive right out of the gate unless you were a heavy corporate email user. I don't know if you ever tried to surf the web on a WinMo or Blackberry device of that era but it SUCKED. By the time the iPhone 3G came out it was game over already.
(And in 2017 I still fucking hate the fact that I can't get a physical keyboard on a decent phone.)
You can't get them on a decent phone BECAUSE the keyboard makes it no longer a decent phone. In 2017 most of the rest of us have realized that tiny physical keyboards actually make the device less useful in most cases because of the tradeoffs required to have one (size, screen, etc). I used to think physical keyboards were good too until I really thought about what I give up to have one. If you really want one there are plug in ones available that supposedly work ok. I'm perfectly happy without one and don't really see much point to them anymore on the device in my pocket. I'd rather use the space they take up for a bigger screen, or more battery, or a smaller device.
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Granted you kid getting access to your phone is often embarrassing, but if one of your coworkers or your boss or a stranger gets access to it it could be devastating.
If your coworkers getting access to your phone results in significant embarrassment I have to ask what on earth you are doing that you should be so embarrassed about. Yes it would be a problem but embarrassment should be pretty far down the list of worries if a coworker were to access your phone.
There is anxiety about automation displacing workers and in many cases, new digital tools allow one worker to do work previously done by several.
We are a species of tool makers. That is what tools do - they multiply our productivity. It's what tools have ALWAYS done. This is nothing new, especially since the industrial revolution. You WANT tools that multiply the productivity of people especially in a place like America which has 1/4 the population of China. Those tools (even for low skill workers) are what allow us to enjoy the high wages and standard of living we have. Don't like it? Too bad. The status quo is not an option and you don't want it to be either. If we go backwards that would be a problem FAR worse than any displacement of portions of the workforce that have been made redundant by technology.
Actually the 737 is just as modern as any aircraft being produced.
That depends on which 737 you are talking about. Some 737 have been in service for 30+ years so calling them modern is a bit of a stretch at this point. The 737 has been produced since the 1960s. Yes current versions are considerably updated and quite modern but there are still a lot of older models still in service that aren't nearly so up to date. There are plenty of 737s in service today that could fairly be described at this point as legacy aircraft. Boeing produces 300-400 new aircraft per year and there have been nearly 10,000 aircraft produced to date.
You did read at least the summary, right? 90% of the commercial fleet is the Boeing 737.
Evidently you did not read the summary. It says "legacy aircraft, which make up more than 90% of the commercial planes in the sky". It does not say the Boeing 737 is 90% of the fleet which obviously verified with a single trip to any airport. Boeing 737 are legacy aircraft and are common but there are a lot of other types of legacy aircraft as well.
In the era before the web, the forums on CompuServe were indispensable for everything from getting tech questions answered to chatting about movies.
Ok hands up if you even gave the briefest thought to CompuServe and their forums in the last 20 years. If you did you are the only one. Honestly I'm kind of shocked anyone was actually maintaining this stuff in any format.
Seriously, when you're being compared to notoriously expensive "cost-plus" contracts with (largely) military contractors, it's not hard to emerge as the cheaper option.
Cost plus contracts only make sense when the costs are difficult to ascertain at the time of quotation. When you are talking about something like the Apollo program, nobody really had any clear idea how much the whole thing would cost in advance because so much of it had never been done before. No sane private company would entertain such a deal unless the government was willing to absorb essentially all the risk. But at this point rockets aren't new technology so it should be reasonably straight forward to make a reasonable estimation of expected costs. (I'm a certified cost accountant in addition to being an engineer so I should know) Cost plus contracts for orbital lift services simply don't make sense anymore and the company that makes the rocket should have to experience some amount of risk.
Generally when a browser boasts of speed increases I sort of shrug because it's rarely obvious. Typically I'm more limited by the speed of the connection than by the browser processing speed. However this time it Firefox actually does appear to work notably faster. I'm not particularly impressed or offended by the visual changes but they are fine I guess. But I am actually (pleasantly) surprised to see how much quicker it works. I use Firefox as my primary browser so it's nice to see a change for the better. Hopefully nothing important broke in the process...
Really? What I took away was, "Look how much more efficient and effective private enterprise is!"
Private enterprise is NOT always more efficient or cheaper. Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good. Roads, policing, primary education, basic research, and many other necessary things that do not have a direct and relatively short term profit motive are difficult for private enterprise to do effectively or efficiently. The notion that private enterprise is always better is idiotic, false and counterproductive. Use private enterprise for what it is good at and government for what it is good at and have them work together when appropriate.
There is absolutely no way the Apollo program could have happened with private enterprise footing the bill. Private enterprise was useful to contract for specific tasks but it never would have happened if we'd let the Invisible Hand of the market do its thing. The Hubble Telescope would never have happened as a privately owned and operated device.
Authentication is predicated upon knowing a secret, which your face isn't
Authentication has nothing inherently to do with secrets. It's merely the act of proving you are who you say you are or verifying some other fact. In some cases secret information can aid in this or make it more dependable but most authentication is actually done with publicly available non-secret information. People recognize your face on a daily basis which is the most basic form of authentication. Sometimes it is useful to layer a secret passcode onto some item you possess or some bio-metric identifier but those merely enhance the confidence of the authentication.
They "patched the vulnerable"? Really?
It's a close relative of Do the needful.
If you aren't blowing things up now and then, you aren't on the frontier of exploration. You cannot know where the line designating the frontier is unless you occasionally step over it.
Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work.
This is a Good Thing. The need to staff a call center is a clear indication of a poorly functioning product or service. It means that some process or product has room to be made better. Call centers are necessary sometimes but really are a waste of human capital. I severely doubt that any near term AI is likely to do away with call centers any more than phone trees have. The better way to do that is to design a product or service that doesn't need the call center in the first place. Using AI to improve call centers pretty much is the most costly way to deal with the issue. Call centers should be a last resort.
There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai that helps train people on deep-learning technology, has some ideas for helping those in jobs he thinks will be automated, from call-center workers to radiologists, truck drivers, and the like.
Radiologists aren't going anywhere any time soon. Yes they have software to aid in diagnosis but that isn't going to get rid of the job - at most it will simply shift how they do it. There still will need to be a human in the loop for quite some time to come. Furthermore even if AI did supplant them, radiologists are MDs and are well trained to get started in a different specialty should the need arise. They'd have to do a new residency if they want to be a practicing doctor but that is all. Or there are countless other jobs (research, etc) which they are amply qualified for.
If someone's only skill is driving a vehicle then perhaps that person should consider educating themselves further.
You just might be the pointy-haired boss because studies show that productivity actually *increases* for those working from home.
Two points. 1) Citation please. Show me your evidence. I'm sure in some cases productivity does improve and in others it does not. I've seen both first hand. I've never seen any studies that prove widespread productivity increases due to working from home. 2) You COMPLETELY missed my point which is that most jobs CANNOT be done from home. Construction, restaurants, retail, manufacturing, warehousing, police, teaching, government, freight delivery, most medicine, and countless other jobs literally cannot be done from home. It is a small minority of work that can practically be done from home productively. Believe it or not there are jobs other than writing code in the world and they have different requirements to be productive.
THere is also a bunch of due diligence that is going to happen before it closes where Broadcom is going to get access to a lot of proprietary trade secret info.
That's not how due diligence on deals like this works unless one of the parties is thoroughly retarded. This is an unsolicited bid. They don't get to come in and examine everything just because they made an offer to buy. There would be verbiage in the buy/sell offer to allow verification of important details but trade secrets remain guarded until the deal closes. There also would be some non-disclosures with teeth and lots of lawyers involved on both sides.
If the deal fails because of regulators or any other reason then Broadcom walks away with a lot of Qualcomm secrets.
No they do not. And if they did there would be lots of flesh eating lawyers involved soon afterwards.
Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
It is a relatively rare job that can effectively and economically conduct all it's communication through IM and video chat. For example I am a manager at a manufacturing company. Our employees do not sit in front of computers writing code all day. If I worked from home I would effectively have near zero communication with my staff because they are busy making products. While I could do some engineering from home, a large chunk of my job would be impossible to do off site. Good luck telecommuting to a hospital or a restaurant or a retail store or fitness center.
There are some cases where telecommuting works great. There are many more where it simply doesn't work at all or doesn't work well. Even jobs that are compatible with telecommuting (like writing code) often find considerable added value in being co-located in the same building. A lot of people lose significant productivity when they aren't in an office and there is a surprising amount of administrative burden to managing a remote team.
Are you high?
Nope. Don't drink either.
Employing a Contract Manufacturer to do the soldering and assembly doesn't make you a "non-manufacturer" of your Hardware products.
Actually it does mean exactly that. Apple does not manufacture their products and has not for a long time. Therefore they are not a manufacturer by definition. Nothing wrong with that but you have to actually manufacture something to be called a manufacturer.
EVERYONE employs Contract Manufacturers. It's just a matter of economic efficiency, since the facilities and equipment are specialized and quite costly.
I am the GM for a (small) contract manufacturing company. I assure you I understand how it works better than you do. If you outsource 100% of your manufacturing then you are by definition not a manufacturer. Companies like Dell and HP contract out some production but they also make a substantial amount of their products themselves. Apple currently makes near as makes no difference none of their hardware nor do the assemble hardware made by others. The do design a lot of it but designing a product does not make one a manufacturer.
Unless you are a (very) high level accountant at Apple, I don't see how you could possibly know whether they are cooking the books or not. They're not going to publish anything egregiously wrong like claiming sales of 5 million iPhones in the Principality of Liechtenstein (pop. 37,000).
The simple fact is that it is plainly obvious that they are selling a LOT of iPhones and selling them at price points that are higher than most Android devices. Since they don't cost more to make then it's a pretty simple logical leap that their business model simply works.
No one predicted the collapse of Enron or RBS by looking at their published accounts.
Did you actually look at the financial statements of Enron? I did. They were the most (intentionally as it turned out) incomprehensible mountain of obfuscation you've ever read. They were written to be effectively incomprehensible even to experts at reading such financial statements. The signs were there and there were people pointing out the concerns even prior to the revelation that it was a huge fraud. Apple's financial statements (which I have also read) are NOTHING like Enron's. While they don't provide unlimited detail, they are pretty straight forward as these things go.
Sure Apple could in theory be covering up a fraud but you could say that about any company. The simple fact is that you have ZERO evidence to suggest Apple is doing anything other than selling a lot of product for a good margin. People love their products and it is clear that they are selling millions of them. Furthermore we can see their supply chain with reasonable clarity and all the evidence there backs up the thesis that they are moving a huge amount of product. If that strains your credulity then by all means provide us with a thesis and evidence with anything to back it up. Otherwise you are simply wasting our time.
Apple is in the business of selling hardware, not selling your data.
While it is undeniable that Apple does make money selling hardware, they aren't really a hardware company. They are a software company and this is something Steve Jobs understood a long time ago. They really make their money selling software. The hardware is simply the means by which they sell their software. The hardware on a Mac is in reality barely different from a Dell or HP computer. The iPhone hardware is barely different from numerous Android phones. Put Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone and customers would leave Apple faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit". The hardware is what facilitates the sale but what people really are buying is the software and that is what they pay a premium for.
Think of it this way. Companies keep the valuable parts of the business. Apple doesn't not manufacture hardware so hardware is obviously not the core of their business. They functions they kept in house are software development and hardware design. The hardware design is simply to facilitate selling the software by putting it in a pretty and well designed box.
And at least so far you are right that Apple does appear to in general be responsible with customer data and privacy. So far... And the reason they can do that is that they haven't needed to get into the ad business to maintain their margins. It's actually one of the reasons I have an iPhone instead of Android. It's not that I think the Android system is bad (it's better in many ways) but Google develops Android specifically so that they can continue to make money with their core advertising business which does not and cannot respect my privacy and data. It's a built in conflict of interest that is not in my favor. I'm actually willing to pay Apple a more to avoid that issue. Your mileage may vary of course.
That plus creating a premium experience translates to a device that people will pay a premium to get.
Correct. And the basis of that experience is software. If Apple sold their software through others they would probably look a lot like Microsoft in a best case scenario. Instead they are a little more vertically integrated to differentiate their products because operating systems tends to be a winner take all sort of business. Had they taken Microsoft's playbook probably one or the other of them would have died years ago. Had they taken the approach of selling hardware with someone else's software they would be nothing more than another me-too vendor of PCs even in the best case scenario and their margins would be a LOT thinner.
And yet, I recall the recent story about the engineer who lost his job and possibly his career because his daughter visited him at the office and took a naughty picture of a new iPhone. Seems like a somewhat evil prioritization of profits over people.
The engineer in question should have known that sharing that information was verboten. He almost certainly signed agreements to that effect. That engineer cut his own throat by disclosing trade secrets of his employer. ANY company in a similar position would have to do the same thing and that is the proper and responsible course of action. Otherwise they send a message that they don't really care about whether people disclose company secrets. We're not talking about some sort of toxic waste dump coverup here. We're talking about carelessly hurting the economic well being of the company and the people who depend on that company. He screwed up. He knows he screwed up. And he got fired for cause. You don't share secrets, even with family. He could easily have prevented the problem by not sharing the phone with his daughter who really is blameless. She was just an enthusiastic kid who got her hands on a new toy and behaved predictably like children do. That has nothing to do with prioritizing profits over people. Those profits actually support the livelihoods of many thousands of people and this idiot engineer needlessly endangered that.
I wonder what type of games they're playing with the books to make this happen.
Cute. I'm an accountant and I've seen zero evidence that Apple is cooking the books. Every indication is that they are simply moving a lot of product and getting very handsome margins on that product.
It's well known that without Jobs Apple has already started going into the meat grinder.
Someone should tell Apple because they are moving more product than ever and profits are UP. People have this bizarre notion that Apple should be releasing some new world changing technology every 18 months. If you look at their history they tend to have about one big idea every 10-15 years or so. The 70s was the Apple II. The 80s was the Mac. The 90s was the Newton (which flopped) and the Powerbook. The 2000s was the iPod and the most recent decade or so was the iPhone/iPad (which are the same device really). What will Apple do next? We should know in the next few years. In the mean time they are doing fine and there is little evidence to suggest they are in any danger of decline. Not to mention that they have a ludicrous amount of cash in the bank - enough to buy both Ford and GM outright in cash if they wanted to.
I have no doubt they can keep this up maybe for decades (Jobs did leave a bank of ideas) but Apple in the end is headed towards the toilet. Just like the last time Jobs left them.
While losing a visionary leader certainly is a big loss, there is no evidence to reflexively assume Apple is going to turn into a dumpster fire without him. Companies don't succeed or fail based on a single person. The question is how well Jobs did in succession planning and in setting up robust management systems. If Jobs did a good job of that then Apple will be fine just like other large successful companies. Part of the reason Apple struggled without him the first time is that they were still a rather young company in a new industry. A lot of the problems Apple had in the 80s and 90s were actually caused by Jobs. Jobs leaving the company probably made him a better leader than he would have been had he stayed.
That's my point. Not everyone at NASA is a rocket scientist. Some are regular administrators, managers, etc.
Those administrators aren't the ones deciding whether on not a printer would be useful on the space station. If anything I'm fairly confident they would try to keep one off the station to reduce costs if possible. They manage the budgets and might veto an idea but they would need the engineers thumbs up and cooperation to get a printer on the station. They use paper on the space station and I'm fairly confident they do so for good reasons. Remember that anything they send up there generally has to last for a long time. Paper doesn't have a power budget. There is the old saying that if you shoot a GPS with a bullet you have a piece of junk. Shoot a paper map with a bullet and you still have a map. Probably applies here too.
Now why they use an inkjet instead of a laser is an interesting question. I presume they had a good reason though I'm curious how often they have to replace the ink and what the relative launch costs would be. Lasers emit some fumes and the toner is a particulate that carries a charge so I'm guessing that played a role.
Seriously, e-paper tablets, even if they had to make/order a custom firmware for it, would be much better. Takes less room, less energy, doesn't need to be re-supplied with paper and ink.
And I'm sure you know what would work better in space than NASA does. The arrogance of a lot of slashdot posters seldom fails to amaze. Do you seriously think that no one at NASA is aware of what a tablet or e-paper is and that they haven't considered the idea? Why don't you find out why they do what they do with printers before you spout off that you know better than literal rocket scientists how to do their job.
This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING.
Evidently you are too young to actually work in a real office. Printers are about as far from dead as one can imagine. I personally print several thousand pages of documents every month. Work instructions, log sheets, customer orders, packing slips, and quite a lot more. I'm an engineer and the work instructions we send to our production floor are on paper. A tablet would be less useful, less flexible, and probably break quickly with the abuse it would take even if we disregard the fact that replacing paper would easily cost six figures in new hardware and custom software and it probably wouldn't result in anything better than what we have now.
Who prints photos anymore?
I do. Photography is a hobby of mine and I print some of the better pictures. Some for display and others to give to friends and family. Walk into any pharmacy and they do a pretty steady business in printing photos.
Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
No. No it does not. The software available for tablets isn't even remotely close to being usable enough, flexible enough, or cheap enough to replace paper. Paper is portable, cheap, flexible, reliable, and ubiquitous. Tablets are great tools in the right setting with the right software but there are countless jobs which lack usable software for a given task and even it it did exist it would be overkill. A tablet for a grocery list? No thanks.
towards elite rent seekers. Owners, not workers. Those folks don't risk anything.
Bullshit they don't risk anything. If you think that entrepreneurs don't risk anything then you've never tried to start or run a company. Owners of companies generally live a life of low grade terror because of the vast number of things that can go wrong and the amount of money they stand to lose.
Their loans are guaranteed, they've got insider information given verbally at country clubs, laws don't apply to them and if all else fails we've given them so much wealth that if they go down they take everything with them.
That's a quaint picture you have that has little correlation to reality for all but a tiny handful of business owners in rare cases. Go ahead and try to get an unsecured loan even if you have a lot of money. I've done it myself and been around plenty of others who have as well including some very wealthy people. It's very rare that you can get a loan without some form of collateral and/or personal guarantee. Even if you are already rich and successful.
STEM isn't going to get you out/up given the amount of outsourcing going on. Only the very brightest can overcome that barrier and not everybody can be a genius, if they could the definition of genius would change.
Who ever claimed that an engineering degree would protect you from globalism? Trying to pretend that global competition isn't a real thing is as absurd as pretending that the industrial revolution was a passing fad or that people will get over these computer things soon. You don't have to be a genius to compete in a global market. But you do have to be aware that the wages will not be set locally and protectionism will not save you.
If you're referencing that Chinese insult about living in interesting times though you're spot on. Between automation, general attacks on education in the form of funding cuts and our endless wars the working class is boned.
It's adorable that you think that. The problem the "working class" (and some white collar work too) in the US has is that in general they want wages that are well above the global average for equivalent work. If you are doing labor intensive work then that work is going to tend to migrate to where labor is cheap. When politicians pander to "bring back manufacturing jobs" what they are really promising is to lower wages to compete with the global prevailing wage. There are plenty of jobs. There might not be plenty of jobs wage levels near the top of the bell curve. Supply and demand. China and India have lots of labor so prices for that labor are relatively cheap. If you want higher than average wages then you had better have higher than average productivity too.
Uh, I was using more fully-featured smart phones years before the iPhone.
Nearly every smartphone since the iPhone has followed the iPhone template and the ones that haven't have failed to find customers. My statement stands You may have had phones with technically more "features" than the early iPhones but not usable ones in most cases. There was NOTHING before the iPhone that was worth a shit for browsing the web and they weren't well integrated devices. The Blackberry did email fairly well but not much else. Nokia was the leading smartphone maker at the time and their smartphones phones SUCKED to actually use. I know because I was using Nokia "smartphones" at the time - they technically had the features but good luck being productive with them. Microsoft's Windows phones were sort of slightly better versions of Palm devices but the interface still sucked. Microsoft was trying to cram desktop windows into a phone form factor and it never worked. Android hadn't really hit the scene yet and the other smartphones out there were more or less inconsequential and sucked.
The only thing they popularized was the touch screen and lack of buttons.
And the apps ecosystem. And multi-touch. And the form factor. And the music store. And MP3 player integration. And usable photo sharing. And google maps (first to use it) and Youtube on a mobile device. And Gorilla Glass. And actual usable web browsing on a smartphone. And virtual assistants (Siri). And visual voicemail. And Facetime. And more. If you think a touch screen and lack of buttons was all they did then you really aren't paying any attention. If you want to criticize Apple there is plenty to pick from but don't trot out that tired nonsense that all they did was round some corners. They weren't the only company doing innovative things but Apple was the company that found the winning formula for the modern smartphone. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality.
Everything else was 2 or 3 steps back from what Win Mo and Blackberry and others were doing.
Not even remotely. I think your recollection of that time period might be a little off. The iPhone basically killed both of those platforms in very short order because it was a better product overall. The early iPhones were competitive right out of the gate unless you were a heavy corporate email user. I don't know if you ever tried to surf the web on a WinMo or Blackberry device of that era but it SUCKED. By the time the iPhone 3G came out it was game over already.
(And in 2017 I still fucking hate the fact that I can't get a physical keyboard on a decent phone.)
You can't get them on a decent phone BECAUSE the keyboard makes it no longer a decent phone. In 2017 most of the rest of us have realized that tiny physical keyboards actually make the device less useful in most cases because of the tradeoffs required to have one (size, screen, etc). I used to think physical keyboards were good too until I really thought about what I give up to have one. If you really want one there are plug in ones available that supposedly work ok. I'm perfectly happy without one and don't really see much point to them anymore on the device in my pocket. I'd rather use the space they take up for a bigger screen, or more battery, or a smaller device.