'Market Cap' is a crock of shit and a red herring. Remember pre - 'crash and burn' Enron. I believe it had an astronomical Market Cap at it's peak of popularity, right before it got obliterated off the planet. It is an almost meaningless set of figures, or perception of value.
Yes, and I'm sure they had their own staff filled with MBA's, as did the entire 'Financial Sector' who nearly crashed the world banking system pursuing immediate yields and returns over common sense and good judgement.
I believe the adolation of MBA's and their culture have been very bad for business in this country, and has been a sea change for the worse here in the last quarter century. I don't think it is a mere coincidence that their short-sighted focus has corresponded with a collapse of American manufacturing. I saw it somewhere I think in the WSJ some time ago that "If Thomas Edison had had an MBA working for him, he wouldn't have invented the Lightbulb, he's have invented the Bigger Candle" The skills you learn there are about being polished and not much else.
In my own experience, too many of the MBA's I have met have been clubby, ruthless, smug, arrogant little snotnoses, filled with their own sense of importance and self-worth.
I think I also read that IBM along with another group of formerly American companies has at last decided to 'detach' from being a purely American concern.
I hope this young man is correct in his assessments which pretty much trash / emasculate Chinas own Cyber vulnerability in the eyes of the readers. I had read for some time already that since many or most Chinese computers run on pirated Microsoft Window products that this could be the case.
I always wonder when odd perspectives like this are injected into a volatile mix in the area of Warfare / Public Opinion / Technology if their isn't some attempt being made to mold, test or to shape popular opinion. This was especially the case in WWII when there were efforts of all sort underway these releases were attempting to obscure through - 'disinformation'. During WWII this was commonplace. To what ends I cannot guess - it could be even be exotic..? Any thoughts on this from the/. Community?
I think you will definitely want to investigate 'Statistics' as a career path to any of the above possibilities. It will open doors for you, and the pay is clearly on an upward trajectory for at least the remainder of our lifetimes. There was a big, front page article about it on the front page of the New York Times within the last year or so - check with the Science Times editor there. Everyone from Casinos, to the military, to the canyons of Wall Street to the upper echelons of every last Search Engine such as Google hire them in droves. They can be found in any high tech environment, where computers are used to analyze vast quantities of information.
They are in very big demand today since the advent of the PC and Internet in the last two decades.
I think the implicit danger here lurks well beyond an innocuous application on a cellphone 'at the movies'. How long will it before all our conversations, monitored anywhere within view of a handheld cellphone, will be subject to said interpretation, from hand held cellphone or otherwise. Reminds me a little of the movie 'The Conversation' I think starring Gene Hackman. We are, like it or not, becoming perfectly lucid, visible and transparent to each other with every passing wave of this invasive and pervasive technology.
I don't know how many of you read the Classic Sci Fi short story: 'THE MACHINE STOPS'. I think it was an Isaac Asimov or an Arthur C. Clark futurist visionary book of short stories, maybe half a century old. Among other components of a future, computer controlled civilization, he posits that entertaining, elegant, exquisite music will be continually played wherever Humans interact, and it will all be computer composed and generated. He posits that after a few generations, human nature being what it is, these civilization will in time lose touch with both how and why computers are able to accomplish these things and will lose touch with how to do much else with them. At some point the computers will all mysteriously, simultaneously start crapping out, much to the shock, surprise and denial of the public, as well as political leadership who haplessly try to reassure everyone that the increasingly discordant music and other areas of their life are just fine, and that there is no need to worry.
The day finally arrives that the whole system shuts down and civilization is perfectly helpless to get these tools back to assisting us, because everyone has become fat and lazy.
Right on for that visionary realization that ever increasingly powerful, sophisticated computers would eventually de-skill even creative areas of human life. Not so sure about ceding the loss of control increasing to systems we will in time no longer fully understand, once wealth, prosperity and humanity's destructive tendencies are managed down to a tolerable - even nonexistant level.
Another story in that book, I believe was a story about a musical algorithm that hit the listener with an steady, endless stream of music so emotionally powerful that the listener was rendered, sort of like a lotus eater, or an addict in an opium den, so overpowered he would neither want to stop or escape - and would just waste away. I think that the music was custom tailored to the brain synapse patterns within the individual listener. This concept of incredible, aesthetically beautiful (artificial) music almost takes on heroic, classical Greek Mythologic proportions, like Narcissus who wasted away peering at his reflection in the water.
Slashdot Mirror
'Market Cap' is a crock of shit and a red herring. Remember pre - 'crash and burn' Enron. I believe it had an astronomical Market Cap at it's peak of popularity, right before it got obliterated off the planet. It is an almost meaningless set of figures, or perception of value.
Yes, and I'm sure they had their own staff filled with MBA's, as did the entire 'Financial Sector' who nearly crashed the world banking system pursuing immediate yields and returns over common sense and good judgement.
I believe the adolation of MBA's and their culture have been very bad for business in this country, and has been a sea change for the worse here in the last quarter century. I don't think it is a mere coincidence that their short-sighted focus has corresponded with a collapse of American manufacturing. I saw it somewhere I think in the WSJ some time ago that "If Thomas Edison had had an MBA working for him, he wouldn't have invented the Lightbulb, he's have invented the Bigger Candle" The skills you learn there are about being polished and not much else. In my own experience, too many of the MBA's I have met have been clubby, ruthless, smug, arrogant little snotnoses, filled with their own sense of importance and self-worth.
I think I also read that IBM along with another group of formerly American companies has at last decided to 'detach' from being a purely American concern.
I hope this young man is correct in his assessments which pretty much trash / emasculate Chinas own Cyber vulnerability in the eyes of the readers. I had read for some time already that since many or most Chinese computers run on pirated Microsoft Window products that this could be the case. I always wonder when odd perspectives like this are injected into a volatile mix in the area of Warfare / Public Opinion / Technology if their isn't some attempt being made to mold, test or to shape popular opinion. This was especially the case in WWII when there were efforts of all sort underway these releases were attempting to obscure through - 'disinformation'. During WWII this was commonplace. To what ends I cannot guess - it could be even be exotic..? Any thoughts on this from the /. Community?
I think you will definitely want to investigate 'Statistics' as a career path to any of the above possibilities. It will open doors for you, and the pay is clearly on an upward trajectory for at least the remainder of our lifetimes. There was a big, front page article about it on the front page of the New York Times within the last year or so - check with the Science Times editor there. Everyone from Casinos, to the military, to the canyons of Wall Street to the upper echelons of every last Search Engine such as Google hire them in droves. They can be found in any high tech environment, where computers are used to analyze vast quantities of information. They are in very big demand today since the advent of the PC and Internet in the last two decades.
I think the implicit danger here lurks well beyond an innocuous application on a cellphone 'at the movies'. How long will it before all our conversations, monitored anywhere within view of a handheld cellphone, will be subject to said interpretation, from hand held cellphone or otherwise. Reminds me a little of the movie 'The Conversation' I think starring Gene Hackman. We are, like it or not, becoming perfectly lucid, visible and transparent to each other with every passing wave of this invasive and pervasive technology.
I don't know how many of you read the Classic Sci Fi short story: 'THE MACHINE STOPS'. I think it was an Isaac Asimov or an Arthur C. Clark futurist visionary book of short stories, maybe half a century old. Among other components of a future, computer controlled civilization, he posits that entertaining, elegant, exquisite music will be continually played wherever Humans interact, and it will all be computer composed and generated. He posits that after a few generations, human nature being what it is, these civilization will in time lose touch with both how and why computers are able to accomplish these things and will lose touch with how to do much else with them. At some point the computers will all mysteriously, simultaneously start crapping out, much to the shock, surprise and denial of the public, as well as political leadership who haplessly try to reassure everyone that the increasingly discordant music and other areas of their life are just fine, and that there is no need to worry. The day finally arrives that the whole system shuts down and civilization is perfectly helpless to get these tools back to assisting us, because everyone has become fat and lazy. Right on for that visionary realization that ever increasingly powerful, sophisticated computers would eventually de-skill even creative areas of human life. Not so sure about ceding the loss of control increasing to systems we will in time no longer fully understand, once wealth, prosperity and humanity's destructive tendencies are managed down to a tolerable - even nonexistant level. Another story in that book, I believe was a story about a musical algorithm that hit the listener with an steady, endless stream of music so emotionally powerful that the listener was rendered, sort of like a lotus eater, or an addict in an opium den, so overpowered he would neither want to stop or escape - and would just waste away. I think that the music was custom tailored to the brain synapse patterns within the individual listener. This concept of incredible, aesthetically beautiful (artificial) music almost takes on heroic, classical Greek Mythologic proportions, like Narcissus who wasted away peering at his reflection in the water.