The problem is IT security is so complex, that most regulations would either be ineffective: because the nature on how the hacks happen will change, overly punitive: where hacks could be used to kill a company, or a company would be afraid to use computers to expand their business.
Claiming that a problem is complex is not a valid excuse for doing the job incompetently such that it results in harm to others. If you cannot manage sensitive data safely then you either need to exit the business or step your game up. They do not get a free pass just because it's a hard problem. If the security problem is that hard that they need government indemnification then they DEFINITELY need to be regulated. Medicine is easily as if not more complex than IT security and yet doctors are held liable for malpractice and are highly regulated. I see no reason why ITprofessionals should be held to a lesser standard of care if they want to manage sensitive data like credit histories or medical records.
Regulations don't have to specify specific technology or tactics. They just have to specify that they have to keep the data secure, what secure means, and outline punishments for failure to do so. If they cannot handle the risk then don't get into the business.
I can think of a variety of ways Facebook could figure out who you interact with. The most obvious is that many people carry around a smartphone with the ability to track their whereabouts. It's not all that hard for a company like Facebook to notice that two people are in close proximity with some regularity if they have some tracking software installed on your smartphone or PC.
Frankly I value my privacy too much to want to have anything to do with Facebook. I simply don't trust the company to be responsible with data about me.
Well, both only deliver thanks to millions in tax rebates, adding millions more in direct payments for milestones during development, and direct payments for cargo with more limitations than not due to the weak rocket power.
Nobody who has the money to buy a Model S or Model X is buying one because they need the tax rebates. It's a cool car that costs nearly six figures and people are buying it because they like the product and what it represents. If they get a tax rebate so much the better but that's not what makes it sell. Furthermore there is NOTHING wrong with some tax incentives to help develop a new clean technology. The internal combustion engine has had a good run but that run needs to come to a close. They are dirty, noisy, inefficient and limited to oil based fuels. If we need some tax incentives to get EVs up to scale then I have zero problem with that. It will benefit us all in the long run.
As for SpaceX, yes the government is a big customer and helped them get the company going but again, so what? NASA is hardly their only customer and are you seriously going to argue that SpaceX hasn't dramatically lowered the cost to orbit just like they said they would? "Weak rocket power"? WTF does that mean? You sound like one of Trumps twitter rants.
We may not be able to beat this one, but we can prepare for this.
True but it will take a LOT more to prepare than many people think.
Improving infrastructure to move people to the east coast. Having a backup supply of volcanic ash resistant air filters, and gas masks, to provide the public. Good relations with other countries as a way to deal with Refugees from America in case of such a disaster...
The problem will be far bigger than some dirt in the air and some refugees. A super volcano going off would cause massive and immediate global climate change. Temperatures globally would fall and crops would fail. Sunlight would be dimmed globally. Feeding people will become a huge problem far outside the US and Canada and a bigger problem in North America. We'd probably experience something akin to a nuclear winter for a time - even normal volcanoes can have measurable and significant effects on the global climate. The global economy would immediately go to shit for a while. Whatever is left of the US would likely be under martial law for a time. This wouldn't be a regional disaster like a typical volcano eruption. This would affect everyone like a large asteroid hitting the earth or a nuclear war.
We're sort of doing the same thing in slow motion with our reliance on fossil fuels and the pollution that results. Problem is that it's happening so slowly and in a way that isn't readily visible that people are able to ignore it. It's a bit like the difference between having a heart attack versus hypertension. The later isn't as spectacular and requires you to eat your vegetables so people tend to dismiss it as not that serious of a problem even though it will kill you all the same.
So much so that unless we solve for the disease of Greed, we will be ultimately destroyed by it.
Greed is what makes every economy work and to think otherwise is naive. Without some amount of greed people sit on their ass and do nothing that they absolutely do not have to. The trick is to harness greed in productive ways and limit the excesses through appropriate laws and social institutions. Unchecked greed is a terrible thing but carefully harnessed and directed self interest can be extremely useful.
they spent billions on a push into mobile, tablet and even console gaming.
They did spend billions. Some of it was even spent sensibly. The problem was execution and the fact that their need to protect Windows slowed them down too much. I think Microsoft's attempts to integrate the PC and tablet (and smartphone) markets were sensible in principle but they flubbed the execution and took too long. Prior to the iPhone they were in the driver's seat for mobile but they didn't react fast enough to the changes in the mobile market post-iPhone. Console gaming is a decent business but they spent WAY too much money to buy their way into that business and it's a business that isn't likely to get much bigger than it currently is.
The trouble is nobody liked the Win8 UI and even if they did developers didn't trust the Windows Store (why should they give Microsoft a 30% cut like they do with Apple if they don't have to?).
I don't think Microsoft's problems stem from the interface in any meaningful amount. Yes there were issues but both iOS and Android interfaces have similar issues if we're being objective about it. I think people would have gotten over it in time if there weren't alternatives. The problem Microsoft ran into is that they were late to market and ecosystems had already developed around iOS and Android by the time they got a viable product out for sale. Once Apple dropped the iPhone they set the template for pretty much every smartphone since. Microsoft's real competition was Google and Google got Android in the hands of handset makers first AND more importantly Google doesn't have to make a profit on Android (they make their money in advertising) so it was both cheaper and more easily adapted to the needs/desires of phone makers and customers. Microsoft then had to try to convince customers that a third ecosystem was worth their while or that they should dump either Android or iOS and that was always going to be a tough sell.
Microsoft is aware they're getting their rears handed to them on phone/tablet. They're just not sure what to do about it.
That's approximately my point. They had their window of opportunity and they seem to have missed it in mobile. They were too busy at the time trying to protect Windows (and Office) to do what they needed to do to get into the driver's seat for mobile. There are plenty of smart people at Microsoft and they know the score but that doesn't make the problem any easier to crack. Apple and Google have similar mountains of cash and breaking into the consumer mobile market at this point against those two is going to be tough for anyone. Google is playing the role in mobile that Microsoft played in PCs. Apple does their walled garden thing and Google serves those who want something else. It's unclear how Microsoft will displace either one at this point.
And managed to burn Nokia in the process (who were in a very strong position before Stephan Elop and Microsoft happened to them).
They did screw up Nokia but Nokia was in trouble before they got into bed with Microsoft. Elop was hired BECAUSE Nokia was in trouble and they knew it. It was a bad hire of course but they did see the problem coming. Their failure was an inability to do anything about it. A lot of this was structural. Smartphones are mostly about software and Nokia was never very good at the sort of software that end users actually care about. They could build a decent piece of hardware but the user interfaces generally sucked for anything non-trivial. For a long time they operated under the misapprehension that their customers were the telecoms like AT&T and Verizon rather than IT departments and end users. Their in house operating system strategy was too fragmented and too little too late. By the time they kind of figured out how to do it right it was too late as the market had already chosen the winners (mostly Apple and Google/Samsung).
Microsoft at one point was in the driver's seat to take over the smartphone market but they blew it. They let Apple and Google get ahead of them while they tried to cram Windows into everything. Both Apple and Google kind of started clean sheet. Microsoft's idea to have a system that was coherent and consistent no matter the device was a good idea but they took too long and flubbed the execution of it.
Probably something like the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem...
Microsoft is a company that found two of the most amazing cash cows of all time and rode them hard. The problem is that the market started to move on without them as markets are wont to do to companies that are too busy milking their cash cows to be bothered worrying about finding the next one. Microsoft's business tactics made sense during Gates era as CEO but about 10-15 years ago they should have been moving onward to the next thing while Balmer was CEO. Microsoft could possibly have dominated mobile but they were too busy protecting Windows and Office and built a toxic company culture to protect those products. The good news for Microsoft is that they have SO much cash that they can screw up a lot before it becomes an existential problem. They could even just buy their way into another industry wholesale if they had to (they have enough cash to buy both Ford and GM) so that hides a lot of flaws that would otherwise have investors screaming.
Two points. 1) Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history. The EU has Free Speech but the details are a little different and that is fine in principle. We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely. Europe obviously feels that it makes more sense to squash to speech up front since they lack the unified government structures to deal with it later like the US does. There are problems with this but that leads to point 2) The EU has had actual Nazis and been the epicenter or two World Wars. Disagree if you like but it's pretty understandable how they might flinch a little at the sort of rhetoric that resulted in literal catastrophic ruin to the continent and millions of deaths. If the US had the history of conflict Europe does you might have a different perspective too.
They aren't. They are/were actually pretty good at it or at least at certain parts of it. People LOVE their software (sometimes to an irrational degree) and are willing pay a premium for it so they must be doing something right for somebody.
Apple's secret to success isn't hardware. It's software.
Steve Jobs said almost verbatim that "Apple is a software company" and he was right. Apple designs nice hardware but it's not really terribly different from their competition and they don't actually make much of it themselves. I could put Windows 10 on a Mac and if you didn't see the badge on the front of the box you'd have no idea you were using an Apple product. You could put Android on the iPhone hardware and you'd never know it was an Apple product. What makes Apple distinct and what enables them to charge the margins they do is the software. Apple is a software company first and foremost. They just sell their software in a pretty box with some nice hardware.
Think about what parts of the business Apple has kept. Software and design. They don't actually make any hardware themselves so they cannot be a hardware company. They have some services but really they are just to support Apple software. Apple is at their core a software company and the rest of it is just tactics to make that work.
The base Model S used to be very under-equipped for its price. The interior is still bad - looks and feels cheap, it's uncomfortable, it lacks the comfort and convenience features of competitors
Having driven both a Model S and more than a few of its competitors I think you are talking out your hind end. It wasn't uncomfortable unless you are a weapons grade snob accustomed to rolling in Bentleys and the like. I think the interior looks great and it certainly doesn't look cheap. Are there more plush interiors? Sure. But good luck finding one with an electric powertrain comparable to the Tesla. Oh, you thought that people bought the Tesla because of the interior?
Charging extra for software is just petty and buyers will agree; other manufacturers like Mercedes charge for hardware-software combinations, not just software. Selling cars with the full capabilities of the hardware included in the price is the next step.
Oh yes, Mercedes is all about value for money... (insert eyeroll here) Do you actually believe that Mercedes sells a lot of cars where they have actually maxed out the performance of their hardware? That almost never happens. They sell tiered versions of vehicles that are intentionally made to perform at less than their full capabilities. No different than Tesla aside from how they go about it. You can increase performance in almost any ICE car simply by buying a new control chip. That's software in case you missed the (screamingly obvious) point.
Finally until the Model S has an interior of the quality seen in Volvo, Mercedes or BMW then it will still look overpriced.
Evidently the interior is the only thing you care about in a car. Kind of missing most of the interesting stuff when it comes to the Tesla when you do that. The Tesla interior is plenty nice enough but if you are looking for a rolling leather couch to settle into then I'm sure someone will sell you the dead cows you so value.
Did you even bother to do any research before posting?
Evidently you did not.
"For the full year 2016, Jaguar Land Rover U.S. sales were up 24 percent to 105,104 units sold, compared to 85,048 units sold in 2015." That's one model in one country (total 487,065 vehicles in 160 countries), compared to Tesla's entire global portfolio. (76,230).
Jaguar and Land Rover are two brands under the same company and you cannot combine their sales if you are talking about Jaguar. In 2016 Jaguar sales in the US were 31,243. The balance of your 105,104 is sales of Land Rovers which last time I checked were not Jaguars.
That's one model in one country (total 487,065 vehicles in 160 countries), compared to Tesla's entire global portfolio. (76,230).
Tesla sold 46,550 vehicles in the US in 2016 (Model S and Model X combined). So yes they outsold Jaguar in the US without any qualifications to that statement. They outsold Jaguar by quite a lot.
For those that didn't RTFA, it seems tomato juice tastes much better on a plane. I fly a lot and can say almost every airline also carries spicy tomato juice for bloody marys too.
That's because your taste receptors become less sensitive. The food they serve on planes is typically seasoned more heavily than normal because people's ability to taste is reduced. Therefore it's not surprising that your perception of tomato juice might be different on a plane than on the ground because it's typically quite salty.
The problem is that they replaced an engineer with a pointy haired boss with an MBA.
The only thing factually correct in that sentence is that Tim Cook does have a MBA degree and there is no evidence that constitutes a problem for Apple. Steve Jobs was not an engineer and did not have an engineering degree (or any other degree for that matter). Tim Cook IS an engineer and does have an engineering degree from Auburn University.
Tim Cook knows how to do is squeeze people for more cash, exploiting their captive user base until people throw their hands up in the air and walk away.
There is no evidence that Apple customers are walking away in any meaningful numbers.
It's ironic, Microsoft is trying so hard to be like Apple, but Apple is trying very hard to be like Oracle.
If you think that then I don't think you've actually dealt with Oracle. The experience of working with Apple is NOTHING like the experience of working with Oracle.
Wow, gush much? I think I need an insulin shot after reading that summary...
That isn't gushing, it's stating a fact that Apple is taking a risk in messing with a successful formula.
"Apple just completely changed the fundamental shape of the most important, most successful, and most recognizable tech product that the world has ever seen."/yawn
Exactly what in that sentence is wrong? The iPhone DID pretty much define the smartphone as we know it today and this IS a change to that. Good, bad, or indifferent the sentence you are snarking about is probably factually correct. The iPhone made Apple the most valuable publicly traded company on the planet and defined a device category. Whether we like Apple or not you have to admit the design of the iPhone had a lot to do with that.
They are also considerably cheaper. The controller typically costs less than $30 compared to the $38,000 cost of a photonic mast handgrip and imaging control panel.
They cost $30 NOW. They won't cost $30 in 2050 when they haven't been manufactured for twenty years. The Navy had better stockpile them today since they aren't really designed to last that long, nor are they designed to deal with a marine environment, nor will sailors in 30 years be familiar with the XBox 360. Not to mention that they certainly won't cost anywhere near $30 by the time they get installed in a sub (assuming the story is actually true...) Something about this story sounds a little off...
If instead you would have typed that exact question into a search engine instead of your comment, I'm sure you would receive a more informative answer than this cheeky wisecrack comment.
The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask the right question but to post the wrong answer.
Explosive charges attached to the tube that detonated five seconds before the arrival of a pod would likely kill everyone on board.
You could say something similar to that about every form of transportation including trains. Yes it's possible to intentionally kill someone. News at 11...
It's unclear what the statistics might be for hyperloop but assuming instant fiery death is probably not going to be correct for the majority of failure modes.
Isn't blockchain mostly for transactions that will never be modified/reversed or are single well-defined actions at a point in time, like transfers of money or sales?
I think a birth fits that definition rather well.
- The whole purpose of blockchain is to have NO central authority, but a distributed public trust. - The whole point of a Birth registry is TO HAVE a central authority.
No, the purpose is to be able to verify data. Centralization or the lack thereof is a side effect - possibly a useful one but a side effect all the same. There is no inherent reason a birth registry has to be centralized. It just has been because it was was the most expedient and reliable process at the time to do so at the time most birth registries were developed. If anything it would be more useful to have a decentralized registry of such public records if it could be done safely and reliably because it become more robust if you have multiple copies. I have family that had critical master copies of documents (birth certificates and military records) lost in fires because they were centrally stored with inadequate backups.
Now whether a blockchain is a good use for this specific problem is something I haven't given serious thought to but it's an interesting question. I've said for a long time that Bitcoin is an idiotic implementation of a currency by people who generally value ideology over evidence in economics. But the blockchain technology it relies upon is actually really promising for a wide variety of practical applications and is probably the most valuable thing about bitcoin.
Allow me to disagree. Being smart is good. And why shouldn't you praise kids for something they do well? We do it in every other aspect of their existence, after all...
The answer is simple if you want to talk in generalizations. Obviously specific individuals may respond uniquely to any given circumstance. It's ok to praise but you can overdo it. The trick is finding the happy medium where you are praising enough to generate confidence but not enough so that they lose drive or behave badly. If someone is constantly telling you you are crap, most children are eventually going to internalize that and believe it to some degree. (certain religions thrive on taking advantage of this fact - see "original sin") Conversely, if you are constantly praising there is a strong tendency to believe that they are $diety's gift and to stop trying so hard. People need a certain amount of challenge and stress to thrive. Not too much and not too little. Finding that appropriate amount of praise versus challenge is not always easy to do.
There is nothing wrong with praise for being smart per-se but the amount can matter. But bear in mind that its a little like praising someone for being beautiful. It is largely genetic and isn't really something they have control over. People don't chose to be smart or dumb. They don't choose to be beautiful or ugly. So praising someone routinely for something they didn't choose can be unhelpful in many circumstances. It's ok to praise to help them understand and take full advantage of their gifts but don't overdo it.
If you're spending more time on documentation than on design or implementation, you're either doing safety-critical work, or you're doing it wrong.
You have that backwards and you seem confused about my point. If something is documented properly then actually implementing it will generally take a minority of the time. Design and documentation go hand in hand - one can not exist without the other. Code can be a form of documentation but the most reliable software out there spends a LOT of time on documentation that is not code. This has nothing inherently to do with safety. Most software "engineering" is in reality badly lacking in process and the results show it. I'm not talking about writing the user manual (though that's important too) but rather the actual documentation that goes with making a product.
95% of software should use design elements that are familiar to the users in a way that makes it easy to discover how to do what they want.
Two points. A) Not all engineering is software. Stop looking at documentation through such a narrow lens. B) You completely missed my point. I'm not talking about the design of the solution or end users. I'm talking about documentation written by engineers primarily for other engineers or other individuals tasked with carrying out the solution. Furthermore if you do want to talk about user documentation, most of that sucks too. The notion that you can do non-trivial tasks without having substantial proper documentation is just absurd. Yes good design minimizes the need for it but to pretend that you can dispense with all documentation because you have delusions that your design is so elegant it doesn't need it.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is IT security is so complex, that most regulations would either be ineffective: because the nature on how the hacks happen will change, overly punitive: where hacks could be used to kill a company, or a company would be afraid to use computers to expand their business.
Claiming that a problem is complex is not a valid excuse for doing the job incompetently such that it results in harm to others. If you cannot manage sensitive data safely then you either need to exit the business or step your game up. They do not get a free pass just because it's a hard problem. If the security problem is that hard that they need government indemnification then they DEFINITELY need to be regulated. Medicine is easily as if not more complex than IT security and yet doctors are held liable for malpractice and are highly regulated. I see no reason why ITprofessionals should be held to a lesser standard of care if they want to manage sensitive data like credit histories or medical records.
Regulations don't have to specify specific technology or tactics. They just have to specify that they have to keep the data secure, what secure means, and outline punishments for failure to do so. If they cannot handle the risk then don't get into the business.
I can think of a variety of ways Facebook could figure out who you interact with. The most obvious is that many people carry around a smartphone with the ability to track their whereabouts. It's not all that hard for a company like Facebook to notice that two people are in close proximity with some regularity if they have some tracking software installed on your smartphone or PC.
Frankly I value my privacy too much to want to have anything to do with Facebook. I simply don't trust the company to be responsible with data about me.
Well, both only deliver thanks to millions in tax rebates, adding millions more in direct payments for milestones during development, and direct payments for cargo with more limitations than not due to the weak rocket power.
Nobody who has the money to buy a Model S or Model X is buying one because they need the tax rebates. It's a cool car that costs nearly six figures and people are buying it because they like the product and what it represents. If they get a tax rebate so much the better but that's not what makes it sell. Furthermore there is NOTHING wrong with some tax incentives to help develop a new clean technology. The internal combustion engine has had a good run but that run needs to come to a close. They are dirty, noisy, inefficient and limited to oil based fuels. If we need some tax incentives to get EVs up to scale then I have zero problem with that. It will benefit us all in the long run.
As for SpaceX, yes the government is a big customer and helped them get the company going but again, so what? NASA is hardly their only customer and are you seriously going to argue that SpaceX hasn't dramatically lowered the cost to orbit just like they said they would? "Weak rocket power"? WTF does that mean? You sound like one of Trumps twitter rants.
We may not be able to beat this one, but we can prepare for this.
True but it will take a LOT more to prepare than many people think.
Improving infrastructure to move people to the east coast. Having a backup supply of volcanic ash resistant air filters, and gas masks, to provide the public. Good relations with other countries as a way to deal with Refugees from America in case of such a disaster...
The problem will be far bigger than some dirt in the air and some refugees. A super volcano going off would cause massive and immediate global climate change. Temperatures globally would fall and crops would fail. Sunlight would be dimmed globally. Feeding people will become a huge problem far outside the US and Canada and a bigger problem in North America. We'd probably experience something akin to a nuclear winter for a time - even normal volcanoes can have measurable and significant effects on the global climate. The global economy would immediately go to shit for a while. Whatever is left of the US would likely be under martial law for a time. This wouldn't be a regional disaster like a typical volcano eruption. This would affect everyone like a large asteroid hitting the earth or a nuclear war.
We're sort of doing the same thing in slow motion with our reliance on fossil fuels and the pollution that results. Problem is that it's happening so slowly and in a way that isn't readily visible that people are able to ignore it. It's a bit like the difference between having a heart attack versus hypertension. The later isn't as spectacular and requires you to eat your vegetables so people tend to dismiss it as not that serious of a problem even though it will kill you all the same.
So much so that unless we solve for the disease of Greed, we will be ultimately destroyed by it.
Greed is what makes every economy work and to think otherwise is naive. Without some amount of greed people sit on their ass and do nothing that they absolutely do not have to. The trick is to harness greed in productive ways and limit the excesses through appropriate laws and social institutions. Unchecked greed is a terrible thing but carefully harnessed and directed self interest can be extremely useful.
they spent billions on a push into mobile, tablet and even console gaming.
They did spend billions. Some of it was even spent sensibly. The problem was execution and the fact that their need to protect Windows slowed them down too much. I think Microsoft's attempts to integrate the PC and tablet (and smartphone) markets were sensible in principle but they flubbed the execution and took too long. Prior to the iPhone they were in the driver's seat for mobile but they didn't react fast enough to the changes in the mobile market post-iPhone. Console gaming is a decent business but they spent WAY too much money to buy their way into that business and it's a business that isn't likely to get much bigger than it currently is.
The trouble is nobody liked the Win8 UI and even if they did developers didn't trust the Windows Store (why should they give Microsoft a 30% cut like they do with Apple if they don't have to?).
I don't think Microsoft's problems stem from the interface in any meaningful amount. Yes there were issues but both iOS and Android interfaces have similar issues if we're being objective about it. I think people would have gotten over it in time if there weren't alternatives. The problem Microsoft ran into is that they were late to market and ecosystems had already developed around iOS and Android by the time they got a viable product out for sale. Once Apple dropped the iPhone they set the template for pretty much every smartphone since. Microsoft's real competition was Google and Google got Android in the hands of handset makers first AND more importantly Google doesn't have to make a profit on Android (they make their money in advertising) so it was both cheaper and more easily adapted to the needs/desires of phone makers and customers. Microsoft then had to try to convince customers that a third ecosystem was worth their while or that they should dump either Android or iOS and that was always going to be a tough sell.
Microsoft is aware they're getting their rears handed to them on phone/tablet. They're just not sure what to do about it.
That's approximately my point. They had their window of opportunity and they seem to have missed it in mobile. They were too busy at the time trying to protect Windows (and Office) to do what they needed to do to get into the driver's seat for mobile. There are plenty of smart people at Microsoft and they know the score but that doesn't make the problem any easier to crack. Apple and Google have similar mountains of cash and breaking into the consumer mobile market at this point against those two is going to be tough for anyone. Google is playing the role in mobile that Microsoft played in PCs. Apple does their walled garden thing and Google serves those who want something else. It's unclear how Microsoft will displace either one at this point.
And managed to burn Nokia in the process (who were in a very strong position before Stephan Elop and Microsoft happened to them).
They did screw up Nokia but Nokia was in trouble before they got into bed with Microsoft. Elop was hired BECAUSE Nokia was in trouble and they knew it. It was a bad hire of course but they did see the problem coming. Their failure was an inability to do anything about it. A lot of this was structural. Smartphones are mostly about software and Nokia was never very good at the sort of software that end users actually care about. They could build a decent piece of hardware but the user interfaces generally sucked for anything non-trivial. For a long time they operated under the misapprehension that their customers were the telecoms like AT&T and Verizon rather than IT departments and end users. Their in house operating system strategy was too fragmented and too little too late. By the time they kind of figured out how to do it right it was too late as the market had already chosen the winners (mostly Apple and Google/Samsung).
Microsoft at one point was in the driver's seat to take over the smartphone market but they blew it. They let Apple and Google get ahead of them while they tried to cram Windows into everything. Both Apple and Google kind of started clean sheet. Microsoft's idea to have a system that was coherent and consistent no matter the device was a good idea but they took too long and flubbed the execution of it.
when MS hired him?
Probably something like the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem...
Microsoft is a company that found two of the most amazing cash cows of all time and rode them hard. The problem is that the market started to move on without them as markets are wont to do to companies that are too busy milking their cash cows to be bothered worrying about finding the next one. Microsoft's business tactics made sense during Gates era as CEO but about 10-15 years ago they should have been moving onward to the next thing while Balmer was CEO. Microsoft could possibly have dominated mobile but they were too busy protecting Windows and Office and built a toxic company culture to protect those products. The good news for Microsoft is that they have SO much cash that they can screw up a lot before it becomes an existential problem. They could even just buy their way into another industry wholesale if they had to (they have enough cash to buy both Ford and GM) so that hides a lot of flaws that would otherwise have investors screaming.
Where Free Speech is not acceptable!
Two points. 1) Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history. The EU has Free Speech but the details are a little different and that is fine in principle. We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely. Europe obviously feels that it makes more sense to squash to speech up front since they lack the unified government structures to deal with it later like the US does. There are problems with this but that leads to point 2) The EU has had actual Nazis and been the epicenter or two World Wars. Disagree if you like but it's pretty understandable how they might flinch a little at the sort of rhetoric that resulted in literal catastrophic ruin to the continent and millions of deaths. If the US had the history of conflict Europe does you might have a different perspective too.
So why are they so bad at it?
They aren't. They are/were actually pretty good at it or at least at certain parts of it. People LOVE their software (sometimes to an irrational degree) and are willing pay a premium for it so they must be doing something right for somebody.
Apple's secret to success isn't hardware. It's software.
Steve Jobs said almost verbatim that "Apple is a software company" and he was right. Apple designs nice hardware but it's not really terribly different from their competition and they don't actually make much of it themselves. I could put Windows 10 on a Mac and if you didn't see the badge on the front of the box you'd have no idea you were using an Apple product. You could put Android on the iPhone hardware and you'd never know it was an Apple product. What makes Apple distinct and what enables them to charge the margins they do is the software. Apple is a software company first and foremost. They just sell their software in a pretty box with some nice hardware.
Think about what parts of the business Apple has kept. Software and design. They don't actually make any hardware themselves so they cannot be a hardware company. They have some services but really they are just to support Apple software. Apple is at their core a software company and the rest of it is just tactics to make that work.
It's a telephone.
No it is not a telephone. It's a handheld computer that happens to be able to make calls. HUGE difference.
The base Model S used to be very under-equipped for its price. The interior is still bad - looks and feels cheap, it's uncomfortable, it lacks the comfort and convenience features of competitors
Having driven both a Model S and more than a few of its competitors I think you are talking out your hind end. It wasn't uncomfortable unless you are a weapons grade snob accustomed to rolling in Bentleys and the like. I think the interior looks great and it certainly doesn't look cheap. Are there more plush interiors? Sure. But good luck finding one with an electric powertrain comparable to the Tesla. Oh, you thought that people bought the Tesla because of the interior?
Charging extra for software is just petty and buyers will agree; other manufacturers like Mercedes charge for hardware-software combinations, not just software. Selling cars with the full capabilities of the hardware included in the price is the next step.
Oh yes, Mercedes is all about value for money... (insert eyeroll here) Do you actually believe that Mercedes sells a lot of cars where they have actually maxed out the performance of their hardware? That almost never happens. They sell tiered versions of vehicles that are intentionally made to perform at less than their full capabilities. No different than Tesla aside from how they go about it. You can increase performance in almost any ICE car simply by buying a new control chip. That's software in case you missed the (screamingly obvious) point.
Finally until the Model S has an interior of the quality seen in Volvo, Mercedes or BMW then it will still look overpriced.
Evidently the interior is the only thing you care about in a car. Kind of missing most of the interesting stuff when it comes to the Tesla when you do that. The Tesla interior is plenty nice enough but if you are looking for a rolling leather couch to settle into then I'm sure someone will sell you the dead cows you so value.
Did you even bother to do any research before posting?
Evidently you did not.
"For the full year 2016, Jaguar Land Rover U.S. sales were up 24 percent to 105,104 units sold, compared to 85,048 units sold in 2015." That's one model in one country (total 487,065 vehicles in 160 countries), compared to Tesla's entire global portfolio. (76,230).
Jaguar and Land Rover are two brands under the same company and you cannot combine their sales if you are talking about Jaguar. In 2016 Jaguar sales in the US were 31,243. The balance of your 105,104 is sales of Land Rovers which last time I checked were not Jaguars.
That's one model in one country (total 487,065 vehicles in 160 countries), compared to Tesla's entire global portfolio. (76,230).
Tesla sold 46,550 vehicles in the US in 2016 (Model S and Model X combined). So yes they outsold Jaguar in the US without any qualifications to that statement. They outsold Jaguar by quite a lot.
For those that didn't RTFA, it seems tomato juice tastes much better on a plane. I fly a lot and can say almost every airline also carries spicy tomato juice for bloody marys too.
That's because your taste receptors become less sensitive. The food they serve on planes is typically seasoned more heavily than normal because people's ability to taste is reduced. Therefore it's not surprising that your perception of tomato juice might be different on a plane than on the ground because it's typically quite salty.
The problem is that they replaced an engineer with a pointy haired boss with an MBA.
The only thing factually correct in that sentence is that Tim Cook does have a MBA degree and there is no evidence that constitutes a problem for Apple. Steve Jobs was not an engineer and did not have an engineering degree (or any other degree for that matter). Tim Cook IS an engineer and does have an engineering degree from Auburn University.
Tim Cook knows how to do is squeeze people for more cash, exploiting their captive user base until people throw their hands up in the air and walk away.
There is no evidence that Apple customers are walking away in any meaningful numbers.
It's ironic, Microsoft is trying so hard to be like Apple, but Apple is trying very hard to be like Oracle.
If you think that then I don't think you've actually dealt with Oracle. The experience of working with Apple is NOTHING like the experience of working with Oracle.
Wow, gush much? I think I need an insulin shot after reading that summary...
That isn't gushing, it's stating a fact that Apple is taking a risk in messing with a successful formula.
"Apple just completely changed the fundamental shape of the most important, most successful, and most recognizable tech product that the world has ever seen." /yawn
Exactly what in that sentence is wrong? The iPhone DID pretty much define the smartphone as we know it today and this IS a change to that. Good, bad, or indifferent the sentence you are snarking about is probably factually correct. The iPhone made Apple the most valuable publicly traded company on the planet and defined a device category. Whether we like Apple or not you have to admit the design of the iPhone had a lot to do with that.
They are also considerably cheaper. The controller typically costs less than $30 compared to the $38,000 cost of a photonic mast handgrip and imaging control panel.
They cost $30 NOW. They won't cost $30 in 2050 when they haven't been manufactured for twenty years. The Navy had better stockpile them today since they aren't really designed to last that long, nor are they designed to deal with a marine environment, nor will sailors in 30 years be familiar with the XBox 360. Not to mention that they certainly won't cost anywhere near $30 by the time they get installed in a sub (assuming the story is actually true...) Something about this story sounds a little off...
If instead you would have typed that exact question into a search engine instead of your comment, I'm sure you would receive a more informative answer than this cheeky wisecrack comment.
The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask the right question but to post the wrong answer.
Explosive charges attached to the tube that detonated five seconds before the arrival of a pod would likely kill everyone on board.
You could say something similar to that about every form of transportation including trains. Yes it's possible to intentionally kill someone. News at 11...
Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash.
Evidently you aren't aware that 95.7% of surviving an accident in a plane. The vast majority of people actually do survive. When the National Transportation Safety Board studied accidents between 1983 and 2000 involving 53,487 passengers, they found that 51,207 survived.
It's unclear what the statistics might be for hyperloop but assuming instant fiery death is probably not going to be correct for the majority of failure modes.
Isn't blockchain mostly for transactions that will never be modified/reversed or are single well-defined actions at a point in time, like transfers of money or sales?
I think a birth fits that definition rather well.
- The whole purpose of blockchain is to have NO central authority, but a distributed public trust. - The whole point of a Birth registry is TO HAVE a central authority.
No, the purpose is to be able to verify data. Centralization or the lack thereof is a side effect - possibly a useful one but a side effect all the same. There is no inherent reason a birth registry has to be centralized. It just has been because it was was the most expedient and reliable process at the time to do so at the time most birth registries were developed. If anything it would be more useful to have a decentralized registry of such public records if it could be done safely and reliably because it become more robust if you have multiple copies. I have family that had critical master copies of documents (birth certificates and military records) lost in fires because they were centrally stored with inadequate backups.
Now whether a blockchain is a good use for this specific problem is something I haven't given serious thought to but it's an interesting question. I've said for a long time that Bitcoin is an idiotic implementation of a currency by people who generally value ideology over evidence in economics. But the blockchain technology it relies upon is actually really promising for a wide variety of practical applications and is probably the most valuable thing about bitcoin.
Allow me to disagree. Being smart is good. And why shouldn't you praise kids for something they do well? We do it in every other aspect of their existence, after all...
The answer is simple if you want to talk in generalizations. Obviously specific individuals may respond uniquely to any given circumstance. It's ok to praise but you can overdo it. The trick is finding the happy medium where you are praising enough to generate confidence but not enough so that they lose drive or behave badly. If someone is constantly telling you you are crap, most children are eventually going to internalize that and believe it to some degree. (certain religions thrive on taking advantage of this fact - see "original sin") Conversely, if you are constantly praising there is a strong tendency to believe that they are $diety's gift and to stop trying so hard. People need a certain amount of challenge and stress to thrive. Not too much and not too little. Finding that appropriate amount of praise versus challenge is not always easy to do.
There is nothing wrong with praise for being smart per-se but the amount can matter. But bear in mind that its a little like praising someone for being beautiful. It is largely genetic and isn't really something they have control over. People don't chose to be smart or dumb. They don't choose to be beautiful or ugly. So praising someone routinely for something they didn't choose can be unhelpful in many circumstances. It's ok to praise to help them understand and take full advantage of their gifts but don't overdo it.
Then again, another study found that students also performed better in school if you paid them to get good grades.
So does that mean they cheat more? Seems like a logical question to ask...
If you're spending more time on documentation than on design or implementation, you're either doing safety-critical work, or you're doing it wrong.
You have that backwards and you seem confused about my point. If something is documented properly then actually implementing it will generally take a minority of the time. Design and documentation go hand in hand - one can not exist without the other. Code can be a form of documentation but the most reliable software out there spends a LOT of time on documentation that is not code. This has nothing inherently to do with safety. Most software "engineering" is in reality badly lacking in process and the results show it. I'm not talking about writing the user manual (though that's important too) but rather the actual documentation that goes with making a product.
95% of software should use design elements that are familiar to the users in a way that makes it easy to discover how to do what they want.
Two points. A) Not all engineering is software. Stop looking at documentation through such a narrow lens. B) You completely missed my point. I'm not talking about the design of the solution or end users. I'm talking about documentation written by engineers primarily for other engineers or other individuals tasked with carrying out the solution. Furthermore if you do want to talk about user documentation, most of that sucks too. The notion that you can do non-trivial tasks without having substantial proper documentation is just absurd. Yes good design minimizes the need for it but to pretend that you can dispense with all documentation because you have delusions that your design is so elegant it doesn't need it.