It is not that complicated. Long before it was predicted that computers would make the a world into a theorized utopia, it was predicted that computer would clean the house while astronavigation was done by hand by smart men, thus reinforcing the bigotry of the 1950's society.
One imagines that the oppressive government was empowered by cheap paper and writing utensil so they could more easily keep files on citizens, but also that the printing press made the distribution of information related to the corruption in government equally easy.
It is said that one of the major advantages of the Europeans that committed the genocide on the Americas was their ability to read and write, and therefore an ability to store, retain, and transfer large amounts of information.
Today many of us consider a person who cannot write a sentence or speak in coherent thoughts an idiot. It is a marker of a education, culture, and basic ability to be a human. While this is not necessarily fair, someone can be born significantly differently abled, we realize that the inability to retain and communicate information still usually limits their position of power.
What is, and always has, been a problem is the access to information, culture, and skills. PBS is hated by some because no matter how the family, no matter what color the family, Sesame Street teaches them basic facts, Lamb Chop(RIP) teaches them basic social skills, and a variety of cultural programs exposes them to art from around the world, creating the basis for a well rounded citizen.
TV, fundamentally evil, provides a potential to maximize equity, but that potential is not realized if all one every watches is Fox News and ESPN.
What we are seeing now is so many kids actively not being taught how to utilize technology to maximize their own goals. Too many teachers, brought up in the oppressive hierarchy, just teach safe social networking and video games, afraid of what students might be able to do if they knew how to use the computer as tool. God forbid they might learn how to code. Just look at how people around react when we suggest that every kids should learn how to code. Many people hear seem deathly afraid that everyone might know how to use a computer. It is like we are suggesting that every kid be sent to sex worker when they turn 13 so they can learn to do sex right.
Back in the late 70's my parents spent scant resources so I was sat in front of a teletype machine and learn to code. In the mid 80's we spent a great deal of money buying me my first computer. Everyone laughed at us, happily spending their scant money on Atari video games.
The thing is that I have mad skills, so I am not the one who can't get a job. The kids today are up shit creek because most teachers are simply too afraid, or can't, teach computers in the class room. Sure kids will waste time, but you know, no matter the technology we figured out how to waste time.
And most people aren't going to use 10 USB ports, but they are cheap so most OEM put them on.
MS is always trying to meet a price point, not provide a full product. For hardware it has little experience doing this because it has always depending on the OEM to take a haircut while maximizing the price of MS Windows. Now that it is system builder, it is not going to sell anything at a loss. A good keyboard and cover is costly component, and as the surface is a low volume device, any custom component is going to be the much costlier. Everyone is saying how great the later part of 2016 was for MS with a boom in surface sales, but that was still less about 1 million units sold, where apple sold almost 10 million iPad units, for he quarter.
It also appears that consumers are extremely price sensitive and won't buy the costlier machines, so MS is correct in selling parsed down machines.
This is my interpretation of the data. The living space in houses over the past 100 years of so has double from an average of under 1000 square feet in 1900 to 2000 square feet today. Over the past 50 years the living space has increased by a third. The 'living space per person has doubled' figures comes from the fact that the average number of people living a household has also shrunk, causes the average living space to double.
Furthermore, the inputs to the cost of a house that will automatically increase as the area of the house increases only make up about 40% of the total costs. So a third increase will at the most increase the costs by 15%.
Much of that cost, arguably, should be offset by efficiency in home building. For example, although building times vary widely from year to year, for the past 40 years it has taken 6 months to complete a single family home. The average 500 square foot increase in size has not significantly increased the time to build the house. In addition, lot costs are 20% of the total costs of the house. In my area, 100 years ago even a modest house sat on 4,000 square feet of land. In the 1950's, that was down to 3,000 square feet. Most houses I have seen built lately sit on less than 2,000 square feet. No one wants big yard, just big enough not build their 4,000 square foot three story townhouse. That, in itself, probably cuts the cost down at least 5% of the 15% increase due to the bigger house.
Then there is the 'nicer part' For the outside of the house, those costs are about 10% of the house. As we said, the outside tends to be smaller, so it can be much nicer at the same costs. The inside of the house is about 20% of the costs. Again, efficiency gains should be able to make the inside much nicer without significantly increasing the costs.
As far as your billionaire food bill comment, I will simply say this. When I was kid, though i had some money, I could hardly afford a bag of chips pr fast food. Now, anyone but the poorest kid has a dollar for a bag of chips of $3 for a happy meal. To put in other terms, my current TV has 4 times the area of the TV we had when I was a kid, and it is color as well, yet it costs less.
I do get the point. People waste money. But really they don't. For instance my cell phone bill isn't much more than a land line cost me 30 years ago. In 1970 I can see people paying a buck for a cup of coffee, which is what is costs now inflation adjusted at Starbucks.
On the other hand, people regularly bought houses for $25,000 in 1970. Today such a house should cost no more than 150,000. For such a house you need to scrounge up $10,000 and maybe $700 a month. But how many houses are on the market for that price? The median home price is more like $200,000.
Here is another thing speaking for an older generation. While i do know people who make six figures who saved for the down payment of their home, almost everyone else I know got money from their parents That is a truth that most people won't admit to you. Along with the amount of drugs they do/did. The older you are, the more cash you have on hand. So middle class parents, who are no longer paying for kids, not longer paying for school, often have several grand that they are happy to give to the adult child to help them start life and a family.
Yes, it is a reskinned safari. On the other hand, a browser is much more than a rendering engine now. It is part of a tool chain, part of an 'ecosystem'. I do use chrome sometimes on iOS because it is separate from by Apple accounts.
Opera has always seemed to have a problem finding a place. When MS was still able to us the desktop monopoly to create a place for IE as an application front, and thus make everything compatible with on IE, Opera tried to get into the MS Windows browser space with a good but not exceptional browser. What they did not do for a long time is get into the newly rebranded Mac OS space and establish themselves as a player there.
In this case they did not figure out how to make a unique product, only how to transmit possible sensitive information over possibly open unencrypted communication channels.
Any computer language is going to teach you how to translate problems into code. The question is what else is the student going to learn.
When I speak about complexity, I specifically mean the nets that the language provides. By enforcing 'good practices', the language becomes less suitable for production, and the student learns that discipline is extrinsic, and never learns the discipline of computer programing. This is a moot point for the web developer, who is never going to do anything outside of a safe sandbox with padded edges, but for others it is important.
One can do anything in Fortran and C, but to get it to work, one has to develop and impose intrinsic rules. Again, for the office that does web development, such thing is not profitable as it interferes with the Red Bull and video game fueled culture. But for serious development, it is critical.
There has been a tendency to use languages that are not that practical for teaching purposes. The alternative was Fortran, which is what I was taught, or C or C++, which is what I was taught in college. I think most would agree that these often are too complex and can impede the learning of principles.
That said, even though Python is sloppy, I find it to be useful in many ways and it does not lead to too many bad practices like Java.
It troubles me that most high school students still learn in Java. I can't imagine that Swift would be worse, or that they would not have a better experience in Python. To me though, if we want to teach programming without a net, and teach how to really think and debug, we should be teaching C. After all, the textbook is only 200 pages.
"The figure that matters is are KwH produced for the money spent. "
Wind power regularly provides overnight sport prices that are negative. Even people on bicycles require regular food. Once fixed costs are paid, wind requires no such costly external inputs
For comparison, rate payers in two jurisdictions are current paying about $100 a month for nuclear power they are not even getting, and may never get given that toshiba has written off $9 billions dollars and the unit has gone bankrupt.
One thing that has been hypothesized is the sheer amount of time people spend on these services. The fact that many have no down time, no time to process, no time for their minds to heal. There have been cases where it has been theorized that children have committed suicide because the bullying was relentless. In time past, one could leave the school, go home, and limit contact to those who did not actively hate you. At the very least, the time one was supposed to be trying to sleep was time when you were not being attacked.
Now many young people never give themselves a break. They are their phones all the time. The bullying on the social network sites never end. The pressure to perform, to be whatever construct you are at school, never ends. It is no longer possible to let your guard down, to let your hair down, to test other possibilities.
I can't see how people do it, being on 24 hours a day.
Interesting this is Android, and Android is notorious for not provided patches to all end users, and for hardware that cannot support updates.
MS is a good corporate solution because it has, in the past, realized that corporate solutions cannot just be updated on demand. Real production machines have to be carefully maintained. This requires funding, and the one place MS has been able to charge for services is the corporate space.They were correct, for the most part, is free is only free if your time is worth nothing. You are either going to pay MS or some other agent of person to maintain production machines.
That said, if corporate is not going to pay to maintain a machine that is out of service then MS would be dumb to do so. For consumer machines, as much as end users like to bitch, there is really no reason not to upgrade every few years or be more risk tolerant. Honestly a simple backup will prevent most ransomware attacks.
The biggest problem with MS products, to be frank, is that they have to support every piece of junk on the market, even junk that no one has used for 10 years. This is the technical feat that MS deserves a great deal of credit, but also why the products are not great.
Education is unique because you want it locked down as corporate, but teachers are not going to be as tolerant with stupidity as corporate. For instance, if a corporate employee can't get work done efficiently because she does not have access to the right software, she can make a complaint to her boss, and either the software will be upgraded or there will be a realization that more time has to be allocated. I see this all the time.
What does not happen, usually, is the expectation that the employee go off clock and do the work themselves, or buy a computer to do the work. This is what happens in education. If a teacher can't get work done on paid time, they are expected to work for free. Free work is usually a result of incompetent management. There is no overtime.
This extends to the classroom. While we all understand that the computer must be locked down, and both Windows and Mac allows administrators limit software that can installed. However limiting software that can be run is going to impose a limitation that many will find too restrictive. For instance, there are some open source programs that are used in science and computer science that can be run from USB. These do not need to be installed. They allow some flexibility so students can learn.
After instruction you are supposed to have some wait time. I find the breath app helps with that. The activity monitor helps with balance of stationary 8nstruction and moving around. I can cancel calls without disrupting.
As shown time and again, there is a significant Luddite element around here that is not creative enough to see possibilities. "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Android is the new MS Windows. Over a billion users, mostly tech illiterate, makes them an easy target. So it is hard to say how much of this is sheer number of users and how much of this incompetence. In the case of MS, there was clearly so incompetence. The ability to email a MS Office document an take down a computer is clearly negligence. I don't know how many similar issues Android has. The fact that Android phones for the most part are not updated regularly is a significant issue.
This to me is the big issue. If you have a firm that is dependent on single client, it is not a healthy company. No one such expect such a firm to be around any longer than the client deems necessary. It is like kids who get out of high school and 'start from the bottom' at a corporation. Sure the potential to climb to CEO is there, but all too often if the corporation tanks, such a person is has no real transferable skills.
That said, Apple probably worked with the company to get expertise in building the chips in house. It was probably able to write contracts to it's advantage because Apple is the only consumer firm that actually has cash and charges prices that will support the development of high end technology. We saw this when Intel was stagnating under the burden of producing cheap kit for cheap computers, but then was able to regain some position when Apple created a demand for higher end product.
Recall that Visicalc was first on the Apple ][. Excel was first on the Mac. While Google now provide a good stack of services, iTools was the first to integrate services across devices. Right now I can get the same information, do the same work, on any one of my machines or devices. It has only become more seamless over time. There are hickups, but it has become much more reliable. MS has attempted to do this, but has been limited as they constantly want to monetize their Office application rather than focus on customer service.
Apple has a the advantage of being able to charge for products, so they do not need to sneakily find a way to find ways to monetize the end user.
This was especially an issue when everyone wanted a cheap machine, and MS still wanted to charge a huge sum for the OS. So we had malware on the computer to help generate a profit for the OEM. We had tricks like a computer with lots of ports, expandable memory and hard drive , a fast processor, but then a slow and cheap FSB that made all the bell and whistles worthless. The Mac was expensive, but you did not pay for anything that was not useful.
The thing is I don't get paid more when something takes me longer. So if I using LaTex or Python or just OpenOffice, the efficiency of the mac is super useful. I think if I had a Unix machine that was equally engineered, that would be great also. But MS was allowed to create a monopoly on the PC OS, so OEMs found it better to sell only MS, even if the margins were razor thin, that develop a good Unix machine. ATT had a beatify Unix micro, I used it for a semester in school, and it would have been nice to see that develop over time. But honestly, like phones, Apple is the only one that has been able to sell at a profit large enough to actually fund R&D.
These standards are just media propaganda. Upgrade because we iterated the standard!
This happens every time. A company says hey, we are improving service, then irrelevant new organizations like Yahoo! publish articles saying it is not really an upgrade, hoping the user will click the link so they don't go bankrupt.
2+2=5 for sufficiently high values of 2. Had a friend once who was getting a masters degree in math. If any student responded to 1+1 with an answer of two was ridiculed. I do the same thing with high school student in digital electronics class.
Unfortunately they better stay away from Texas. The Lege is currently working on legislation meant to restrict the ability of transportation projects, specifically high speed rail, to use state funds and emminent domain to complete the projects. If they were building an pipeline, that would be great. The state government has not problem in stealing peoples land and giving it to a foreign government. But if these bills get passed, it is going to be pretty easy for a land owner, or a municipality, to go to court and block the project.
For years, researchers have identify Texas as the best place to prototype a high sped transportation system, specifically between houston and dallas, becuase so much of the right of way is already owned by the state and there is a great deal of traffic between the two locations. However, the politics has never been amiable to this happening. The other issue is that lack of ancillary public transportation. Megabus can get you between cities pretty fast, but what do you do when you get there? In cities like San Antonio you have to get a Uber. In Houston you can take light rail to get to a few places, but Austin you are stuck on unreliable busses. It is not like Portland and Seattle where you can hope on another train and basically get anywhere you want..
So somehow we have all lost over the past hundred years? Our quality of life is worse? You don't like the fact that you can go out by cheap toilet paper?
There are things that are worse. Due to the much lower standard of living, when I go out of the country I buy wool, handmade on a loom, handmade into all sorts of cool stuff. Again, this is possible, because of a low standard of living, where not everyone even has a video game console. True, the food better, the product are better, the air is better, but I don't know if that is what we want for the US.
A valid point was hit at the end. The problem we have is that efficiency gains have not been equitably distributed. There has been so many gains in my lifetime. We don't need to work more than 30 hours a week. Minimum wage should be $20 an hour. But count on this. Your job will be replaced or majorly displaced by robots. Ask any typewrite sales person. The question is whether you will be unemployed or educated.
There are many variables the researches may not controlled for. Being published in an 'educational psychology' journal I am not confident of the results as many metastudies have shown that educational research more often that not is rigorous. In one metastudy they found that 80% of the articles could not be used due to basic flaws in design or statistics.
The immediate flaw I though of was controlling for teachers. I have seen math teachers who work with everyone, but there are still too many that only teach boys. Cultural effects cannot be ignored. This is consistent with one result which has been widely verified with good research, that programs are very difficult to put into production. Most strategies work well for a group of students and a group of teachers. Pushing the strategy to everyone generally fails. This is why any program, even something as simple was more math and science, has to be flexible.
According to this argument, nothing that is used in the design cycle works because it does not work individually. Brainstorming is one tool that you can use in design or engineering work. Like any tool, it is not intended to be used on it's own. So you brainstorm, design, brainstorm, design, build, etc.
One big benefit of brainstorming, when it is done right, it that it gets the bullshit ideas out of the way so the group can dig deeply for good ideas. If there is one person, working on one thing, an entire year might be spent building the dumbest thing imaginable. And while that sometimes leads to a profitable product, I don't think it is the most reliable method
Most Trump supporters are probably not worried that immigrants are coming from India and taking the jobs from IT workers. most of these workers are in the 'liberal' coastal cities that did not vote for Trump, and as such, are of no consequence. Trump campaigned on closing the border to immigrants that are taking low wage hard jobs that Americans do not want.
On the other hand Trump has asked for visa for over a 1000 foriegn workers over the past decade of so. These are for the type of jobs that should be easy to fill with US workers. Cooks, golf caddies, picking grapes, etc. These are not high skilled jobs, and the only reason to import workers is because of the potentially lower pay or ability to deport workers if they refuse to work, or complain about the condition, of violate confidentiality agreements.
In the cities talked about in the article, i.e. Austin and San Antonio, one is not spending $4,000 a month for a shoebox apartment. That much money would rent a very nice apartment, or buy a modest house in a desirable part of the city.
But many people are looking for a house that is about a maybe two or three square foot for every dollar of their monthly mortgage. That can be hard to find in the city. While one can find a very desirable house at very reasonable costs in the city, it is often in locations where there are diverse people.
The other item is similar to when people moved into the city. More young adults are used to living in the suburbs, and while may move to the city when they are young, are inevitably going to move back to their childhood norm, which increasingly is the exurbs.
Slashdot Mirror
One imagines that the oppressive government was empowered by cheap paper and writing utensil so they could more easily keep files on citizens, but also that the printing press made the distribution of information related to the corruption in government equally easy.
It is said that one of the major advantages of the Europeans that committed the genocide on the Americas was their ability to read and write, and therefore an ability to store, retain, and transfer large amounts of information.
Today many of us consider a person who cannot write a sentence or speak in coherent thoughts an idiot. It is a marker of a education, culture, and basic ability to be a human. While this is not necessarily fair, someone can be born significantly differently abled, we realize that the inability to retain and communicate information still usually limits their position of power.
What is, and always has, been a problem is the access to information, culture, and skills. PBS is hated by some because no matter how the family, no matter what color the family, Sesame Street teaches them basic facts, Lamb Chop(RIP) teaches them basic social skills, and a variety of cultural programs exposes them to art from around the world, creating the basis for a well rounded citizen.
TV, fundamentally evil, provides a potential to maximize equity, but that potential is not realized if all one every watches is Fox News and ESPN.
What we are seeing now is so many kids actively not being taught how to utilize technology to maximize their own goals. Too many teachers, brought up in the oppressive hierarchy, just teach safe social networking and video games, afraid of what students might be able to do if they knew how to use the computer as tool. God forbid they might learn how to code. Just look at how people around react when we suggest that every kids should learn how to code. Many people hear seem deathly afraid that everyone might know how to use a computer. It is like we are suggesting that every kid be sent to sex worker when they turn 13 so they can learn to do sex right.
Back in the late 70's my parents spent scant resources so I was sat in front of a teletype machine and learn to code. In the mid 80's we spent a great deal of money buying me my first computer. Everyone laughed at us, happily spending their scant money on Atari video games.
The thing is that I have mad skills, so I am not the one who can't get a job. The kids today are up shit creek because most teachers are simply too afraid, or can't, teach computers in the class room. Sure kids will waste time, but you know, no matter the technology we figured out how to waste time.
MS is always trying to meet a price point, not provide a full product. For hardware it has little experience doing this because it has always depending on the OEM to take a haircut while maximizing the price of MS Windows. Now that it is system builder, it is not going to sell anything at a loss. A good keyboard and cover is costly component, and as the surface is a low volume device, any custom component is going to be the much costlier. Everyone is saying how great the later part of 2016 was for MS with a boom in surface sales, but that was still less about 1 million units sold, where apple sold almost 10 million iPad units, for he quarter.
It also appears that consumers are extremely price sensitive and won't buy the costlier machines, so MS is correct in selling parsed down machines.
Furthermore, the inputs to the cost of a house that will automatically increase as the area of the house increases only make up about 40% of the total costs. So a third increase will at the most increase the costs by 15%.
Much of that cost, arguably, should be offset by efficiency in home building. For example, although building times vary widely from year to year, for the past 40 years it has taken 6 months to complete a single family home. The average 500 square foot increase in size has not significantly increased the time to build the house. In addition, lot costs are 20% of the total costs of the house. In my area, 100 years ago even a modest house sat on 4,000 square feet of land. In the 1950's, that was down to 3,000 square feet. Most houses I have seen built lately sit on less than 2,000 square feet. No one wants big yard, just big enough not build their 4,000 square foot three story townhouse. That, in itself, probably cuts the cost down at least 5% of the 15% increase due to the bigger house.
Then there is the 'nicer part' For the outside of the house, those costs are about 10% of the house. As we said, the outside tends to be smaller, so it can be much nicer at the same costs. The inside of the house is about 20% of the costs. Again, efficiency gains should be able to make the inside much nicer without significantly increasing the costs.
As far as your billionaire food bill comment, I will simply say this. When I was kid, though i had some money, I could hardly afford a bag of chips pr fast food. Now, anyone but the poorest kid has a dollar for a bag of chips of $3 for a happy meal. To put in other terms, my current TV has 4 times the area of the TV we had when I was a kid, and it is color as well, yet it costs less.
I do get the point. People waste money. But really they don't. For instance my cell phone bill isn't much more than a land line cost me 30 years ago. In 1970 I can see people paying a buck for a cup of coffee, which is what is costs now inflation adjusted at Starbucks.
On the other hand, people regularly bought houses for $25,000 in 1970. Today such a house should cost no more than 150,000. For such a house you need to scrounge up $10,000 and maybe $700 a month. But how many houses are on the market for that price? The median home price is more like $200,000. Here is another thing speaking for an older generation. While i do know people who make six figures who saved for the down payment of their home, almost everyone else I know got money from their parents That is a truth that most people won't admit to you. Along with the amount of drugs they do/did. The older you are, the more cash you have on hand. So middle class parents, who are no longer paying for kids, not longer paying for school, often have several grand that they are happy to give to the adult child to help them start life and a family.
Opera has always seemed to have a problem finding a place. When MS was still able to us the desktop monopoly to create a place for IE as an application front, and thus make everything compatible with on IE, Opera tried to get into the MS Windows browser space with a good but not exceptional browser. What they did not do for a long time is get into the newly rebranded Mac OS space and establish themselves as a player there.
In this case they did not figure out how to make a unique product, only how to transmit possible sensitive information over possibly open unencrypted communication channels.
When I speak about complexity, I specifically mean the nets that the language provides. By enforcing 'good practices', the language becomes less suitable for production, and the student learns that discipline is extrinsic, and never learns the discipline of computer programing. This is a moot point for the web developer, who is never going to do anything outside of a safe sandbox with padded edges, but for others it is important.
One can do anything in Fortran and C, but to get it to work, one has to develop and impose intrinsic rules. Again, for the office that does web development, such thing is not profitable as it interferes with the Red Bull and video game fueled culture. But for serious development, it is critical.
There has been a tendency to use languages that are not that practical for teaching purposes. The alternative was Fortran, which is what I was taught, or C or C++, which is what I was taught in college. I think most would agree that these often are too complex and can impede the learning of principles.
That said, even though Python is sloppy, I find it to be useful in many ways and it does not lead to too many bad practices like Java.
It troubles me that most high school students still learn in Java. I can't imagine that Swift would be worse, or that they would not have a better experience in Python. To me though, if we want to teach programming without a net, and teach how to really think and debug, we should be teaching C. After all, the textbook is only 200 pages.
Wind power regularly provides overnight sport prices that are negative. Even people on bicycles require regular food. Once fixed costs are paid, wind requires no such costly external inputs
For comparison, rate payers in two jurisdictions are current paying about $100 a month for nuclear power they are not even getting, and may never get given that toshiba has written off $9 billions dollars and the unit has gone bankrupt.
Now many young people never give themselves a break. They are their phones all the time. The bullying on the social network sites never end. The pressure to perform, to be whatever construct you are at school, never ends. It is no longer possible to let your guard down, to let your hair down, to test other possibilities.
I can't see how people do it, being on 24 hours a day.
So they remotely encrypt my remote Dropbox files, or just local copies?
MS is a good corporate solution because it has, in the past, realized that corporate solutions cannot just be updated on demand. Real production machines have to be carefully maintained. This requires funding, and the one place MS has been able to charge for services is the corporate space.They were correct, for the most part, is free is only free if your time is worth nothing. You are either going to pay MS or some other agent of person to maintain production machines.
That said, if corporate is not going to pay to maintain a machine that is out of service then MS would be dumb to do so. For consumer machines, as much as end users like to bitch, there is really no reason not to upgrade every few years or be more risk tolerant. Honestly a simple backup will prevent most ransomware attacks.
The biggest problem with MS products, to be frank, is that they have to support every piece of junk on the market, even junk that no one has used for 10 years. This is the technical feat that MS deserves a great deal of credit, but also why the products are not great.
What does not happen, usually, is the expectation that the employee go off clock and do the work themselves, or buy a computer to do the work. This is what happens in education. If a teacher can't get work done on paid time, they are expected to work for free. Free work is usually a result of incompetent management. There is no overtime.
This extends to the classroom. While we all understand that the computer must be locked down, and both Windows and Mac allows administrators limit software that can installed. However limiting software that can be run is going to impose a limitation that many will find too restrictive. For instance, there are some open source programs that are used in science and computer science that can be run from USB. These do not need to be installed. They allow some flexibility so students can learn.
As shown time and again, there is a significant Luddite element around here that is not creative enough to see possibilities. "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Android is the new MS Windows. Over a billion users, mostly tech illiterate, makes them an easy target. So it is hard to say how much of this is sheer number of users and how much of this incompetence. In the case of MS, there was clearly so incompetence. The ability to email a MS Office document an take down a computer is clearly negligence. I don't know how many similar issues Android has. The fact that Android phones for the most part are not updated regularly is a significant issue.
That said, Apple probably worked with the company to get expertise in building the chips in house. It was probably able to write contracts to it's advantage because Apple is the only consumer firm that actually has cash and charges prices that will support the development of high end technology. We saw this when Intel was stagnating under the burden of producing cheap kit for cheap computers, but then was able to regain some position when Apple created a demand for higher end product.
Apple has a the advantage of being able to charge for products, so they do not need to sneakily find a way to find ways to monetize the end user.
This was especially an issue when everyone wanted a cheap machine, and MS still wanted to charge a huge sum for the OS. So we had malware on the computer to help generate a profit for the OEM. We had tricks like a computer with lots of ports, expandable memory and hard drive , a fast processor, but then a slow and cheap FSB that made all the bell and whistles worthless. The Mac was expensive, but you did not pay for anything that was not useful.
The thing is I don't get paid more when something takes me longer. So if I using LaTex or Python or just OpenOffice, the efficiency of the mac is super useful. I think if I had a Unix machine that was equally engineered, that would be great also. But MS was allowed to create a monopoly on the PC OS, so OEMs found it better to sell only MS, even if the margins were razor thin, that develop a good Unix machine. ATT had a beatify Unix micro, I used it for a semester in school, and it would have been nice to see that develop over time. But honestly, like phones, Apple is the only one that has been able to sell at a profit large enough to actually fund R&D.
This happens every time. A company says hey, we are improving service, then irrelevant new organizations like Yahoo! publish articles saying it is not really an upgrade, hoping the user will click the link so they don't go bankrupt.
2+2=5 for sufficiently high values of 2. Had a friend once who was getting a masters degree in math. If any student responded to 1+1 with an answer of two was ridiculed. I do the same thing with high school student in digital electronics class.
For years, researchers have identify Texas as the best place to prototype a high sped transportation system, specifically between houston and dallas, becuase so much of the right of way is already owned by the state and there is a great deal of traffic between the two locations. However, the politics has never been amiable to this happening. The other issue is that lack of ancillary public transportation. Megabus can get you between cities pretty fast, but what do you do when you get there? In cities like San Antonio you have to get a Uber. In Houston you can take light rail to get to a few places, but Austin you are stuck on unreliable busses. It is not like Portland and Seattle where you can hope on another train and basically get anywhere you want..
There are things that are worse. Due to the much lower standard of living, when I go out of the country I buy wool, handmade on a loom, handmade into all sorts of cool stuff. Again, this is possible, because of a low standard of living, where not everyone even has a video game console. True, the food better, the product are better, the air is better, but I don't know if that is what we want for the US.
A valid point was hit at the end. The problem we have is that efficiency gains have not been equitably distributed. There has been so many gains in my lifetime. We don't need to work more than 30 hours a week. Minimum wage should be $20 an hour. But count on this. Your job will be replaced or majorly displaced by robots. Ask any typewrite sales person. The question is whether you will be unemployed or educated.
The immediate flaw I though of was controlling for teachers. I have seen math teachers who work with everyone, but there are still too many that only teach boys. Cultural effects cannot be ignored. This is consistent with one result which has been widely verified with good research, that programs are very difficult to put into production. Most strategies work well for a group of students and a group of teachers. Pushing the strategy to everyone generally fails. This is why any program, even something as simple was more math and science, has to be flexible.
One big benefit of brainstorming, when it is done right, it that it gets the bullshit ideas out of the way so the group can dig deeply for good ideas. If there is one person, working on one thing, an entire year might be spent building the dumbest thing imaginable. And while that sometimes leads to a profitable product, I don't think it is the most reliable method
On the other hand Trump has asked for visa for over a 1000 foriegn workers over the past decade of so. These are for the type of jobs that should be easy to fill with US workers. Cooks, golf caddies, picking grapes, etc. These are not high skilled jobs, and the only reason to import workers is because of the potentially lower pay or ability to deport workers if they refuse to work, or complain about the condition, of violate confidentiality agreements.
What's up with the star pattern outside of Santa Fe, nm. Is that where the allien space craft land?
But many people are looking for a house that is about a maybe two or three square foot for every dollar of their monthly mortgage. That can be hard to find in the city. While one can find a very desirable house at very reasonable costs in the city, it is often in locations where there are diverse people.
The other item is similar to when people moved into the city. More young adults are used to living in the suburbs, and while may move to the city when they are young, are inevitably going to move back to their childhood norm, which increasingly is the exurbs.