If an America company was smart (kodak comes to mind, but then, they are not very smart), they would follow the Fischer Pen approach and design a camera to survive in space, water, etc. and then advertise it as being rugged for space as well as water, camping, etc.
Of course, Hasselblad products were already absurdly rugged (and expensive to match), so it's likely that very little additional engineering effort was required.
Critical and non-critical systems should not be allowed to talk to each other unless absolutely necessary.
Even then, there should be no scenario in which pressing the brake pedal does not stop the car. No electrical signal or command should ever be able to override this action. Furthermore, given that the components are already networked, Toyota should have added a few lines of code to automatically stall the engine if the computer detects simultaneous inputs on the brake and gas pedals.
Aha. I stand corrected, and actually may upgrade once the next revision comes out! My other complaint with the product line is that Apple generally neglects updating it for long periods.
The thing about the RAM is that I felt that 2GB was "plenty" when I got my Core Duo mini. These days, it's plainly not enough. Even web browsers like to gobble up that much!
So a handful of patent lawsuits and a weirdly restrictive app store make a company "crazy evil?"
Pardon me if I can't quite hear Steve Jobs cackling in the background, but technology companies have been suing each other for patent violations as long as they have existed -- even our darlings at Novell are no strangers to being on the plaintiff's stand at patent hearings.
When they got successful with the iPod, they brought legal (and eventually drm-free) downloads to the masses -- great for artists and consumers alike. I'm not a fan of the proprietary format, so I shop at Amazon these days, although Apple certainly deserves credit where it's due for (finally) managing to get the industry on board for a sales model that wasn't entirely draconian. Without iTunes, there'd be no Amazon mp3 store.
The iPhone is also the most open platform to have ever reached a considerable portion of casual cell phone users, and spurred considerable innovation in the industry. Without the iPhone, there almost certainly would be no Android. Again, I don't own one because of the stupid app store policies, but it's not hard to acknowledge the effect it had on the marketplace. It really was the first smartphone that didn't completely suck.
Although Apple's ideas might not all be completely original, their talent scouts seem to have a knack for snatching up promising technologies, and incorporating them into successful products, largely influenced by their user-centric design and extensive usability testing. At the end of the day, this is really all that matters to the company -- it doesn't matter if the technology was invented in-house, purchased outright, or "inspired" by something else. After all, Jobs loves quoting Picasso: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
I put a 7200 RPM hard drive in my mini, and definitely appreciated the speed boost, so I can definitely see where you're coming from. (And unlike the SSD, I ended up increasing my internal storage capacity, and didn't go broke in the process)
Of course, my own personal pet peeve with the Mini is its absurdly maximum memory capacity -- 2gb on early Intel models, 4gb on more recent models. This is barely acceptable for a laptop, let alone a (tiny) desktop.
Somehow, I find it surprising that you're managing to saturate a modern hard drive via a single network connection. Are you running extremely slow PCs on a ridiculously fast network? The workflow that you describe sounds pretty normal for a design studio.
Hm... Here in DC and Baltimore, I've never seen a garage left open, despite a profound lack of such laws. Of course, I imagine that the reasons for this are quite different;-)
Remember that separation of powers is quite extensive in the US. We have local, county, state, and federal laws to contend with. With the exception of defense and security, the federal government is quite limited in its scope, and has only really expanded over the past 50 years for a variety of fairly mundane technology-related reasons -- it makes sense that we only have one FDA and one NASA.
On the other hand, state (and especially local) laws have had the tendency to be draconian, overbearing, and rarely challenged in the courts. Ironically, most of the worst offenders in this area are extremely conservative constituencies.
A huge portion of the modern conservative and libertarian movement is simply the centuries-old states' rights camp in disguise.
And even that's not a great comparison. Microsoft have issued a legally-binding promise not to sue over C# patents in Mono. On the other hand, some of the other technologies you mentioned contain patents that are actively pursued by their holders.
You missed my point: Although I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's razor (Never ascribe to malice what you can to incompetence), I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that the same nation that put a man on the moon cannot figure out how to reliably or profitably run a train service between DC and Boston.
One can only conclude, then, that governmental regulation of the railroads was designed with the intent of strangling the rail industry. It's no secret that the government was in cahoots with the auto industry for a great many years (particularly when much of this regulation was put in place).
I do not believe that government regulation is intrinsically corrupt, although I do believe that it can be prone to poisoning, as was the case here. Virtually every rail network on the planet is nationalized, and all of America's peers (with the exception of Canada) have absolutely no problem making the trains run quickly and on time.
You can only use the word "arguably" for cases such as Amtrak, in which the agency has been deliberately mismanaged by small-government advocates looking to produce justification for their causes.
If people want to advocate for less government, they're welcome to do it. However, it would seem incredibly unwise to put those people at the helm of the remaining government services that we'd actually like to keep.
Not necessarily. For instance, Wal-Mart has implemented a number of "green" policies that have seriously helped their bottom line by improving the efficiency of their distribution network, cutting energy usage in their stores and warehouses by installing skylights, and using reusable shipping materials wherever possible.
There are many ways for businesses to "go green" and improve their profits.
Banning DDT made sense in the US, because our Malaria rates are rather low, and we can afford the more expensive alternatives to DDT that don't interfere with local wildlife.
There was also quite a bit of hysteria at the time concerning its potential effect on humans, which was perhaps a good precaution to take, but ultimately unnecessary, as these claims were extensively debunked.
Oh, for Christ sake.... will you people stop bashing DC for the snow debacle. The amount of snow that fell shattered every snowfall-related record in the books.
Criticizing DC for being unprepared for 40"+ inches of snow is akin to criticizing Chicago for being unprepared for an earthquake. I've spent most of my life up north in snowier climates, and can say with a high degree of certainty that both storms would have still been major events up there.
I'd imagine that Toyota's use of MATLAB is limited to product design, development, and simulation -- not actual production software in their cars. I used to write quite a bit of MATLAB code, and although it's great for the situations I just described, I can't possibly imagine wanting to use the language to do *anything* else.
If anything, they're using something like ADA or VHDL.
ZFS itself isn't exactly a performance screamer, although it offers some of the best volume management and redundancy options in the business. A few features (such as the ability to grow a raidz pool) are still waiting on the sidelines, although they are for the most part very competitive with what you'd get from an enterprise-grade RAID controller.
Of course, if you want high performance and redundancy, you'll still need to resort to one of those expensive RAID controllers, and something like iSCSI, which allows for graceful and transparent failover in the event of a hardware failure in the array itself.
So the lawyer thought they could win and was wrong. That somehow excuses them from being pricks by suing in the first place? You make it sound like the lawyer somehow forced Magic Jack to sue.
Yes. A good lawyer should have told them they had no chance of winning the lawsuit. Prosecuting a libel case in the US is extremely difficult even when the plaintiff has a legitimate case to make.
Actually, according to TFA, Apple's built-in toolkits (used by Aperture and Pixelmator) seem to be immune to this bug. Photoshop ceased being a mac-like application a very long time ago.
This is one of many reasons why creative professionals prefer macs over PCs --- and I'm not saying this as platform evangelism -- for one, you'd be hard pressed to disagree that Mac OS X's font-rendering, kerning, and anti-aliasing abilities are far superior to those provided by Windows when presented with side-by-side examples. It's lots of little things (many of which likely took the programmers a great deal of time to get right) that make the platform so nice to work with. Likewise, Adobe is quickly exhausting its remaining good will with the graphic design community, as recent Photoshop releases have declined significantly in quality, and have generally added little value to the application, as well as the abomination that is the Flash player.
I haven't checked Win7 yet, but as of Vista, Windows still presented windows-3.1-style dialog boxes when adding fonts. Although this is a fairly superficial example, it provides a great example of Microsoft's general neglect of its existing codebases. Once a feature becomes "stable," it rarely if ever gets refined or tweaked in subsequent releases, while poorly-integrated features get piled on top (although it must be said that when Microsoft finally does choose to overhaul part of the UI, they generally do a pretty good job of it. IE7 and 8 are notable exceptions, and actually seem to have been made intentionally confusing -- even the KDE, GIMP, and Blender folks would struggle to make a UI so cryptic, inconsistent, and foreign-looking)
Back when it was introduced, ActiveX had no legitimate competitors. Although AJAX has considerably leveled the playing field, it's a fairly recent innovation compared to ActiveX (and also one that Microsoft pioneered).
Java was never really an option, given its tendency to be a resource hog when operating inside the browser, difficulty of interacting with non-java workflows and toolkits, and the fact that there simply weren't all that many Java developers around when ActiveX was first introduced.
For better or worse, most corporations use a Microsoft-based workflow, which made ActiveX an attractive option.
Look at this on the bright side -- the librarians at the National Archives won't have to strain their backs to lift and catalogue a tiny collection of 140-character messages. Must be a nice break next to the 5,000 page budget proposals they've gotten used to seeing.
I'm too lazy to do it again, but if you pull the numbers and do the math, the number of H1Bs that Microsoft employs is a rather small percentage of their total workforce.
In other words, Microsoft employs a ton of H1B visa holders because it has an absolutely massive overall number of employees. It's not particularly surprising that a company that engages in product development and basic research would require some foreign expertise. (Supporting this theory is that Microsoft's H1B applications have reportedly dropped at a rate that's roughly inversely proportional to the unemployment rate)
That all said, the H1B "problem" seems to be wildly blown out of proportion. The current law allows for 65,000 visas to be issued each year. In a country of 300 million people, 65,000 is really just a drop in the bucket (0.02% of the population, 0.04% of the labor force). Accounting for the total number of H1B holders is a bit more difficult, but even at 1 million (a wildly generous estimate), would still be less than 1% of the total workforce.
Also don't forget that there are plenty of Americans who work overseas. A degree of international mobility in the labor market is generally a good thing, as long as it's kept under reasonable control.
Any scientist dumb enough to falsify his results probably isn't smart enough to be doing science in the first place. I'd be inclined to ignore anything this guy says, both past and future.
Are you really all that shocked to learn that there are a few bad apples in any particular field or organization? (Recall the Acorn "esposé" that took the reporters several dozen attempts before somebody finally fell for the bait). A theory is NOT disproven just because a few select scientists were corrupt, or a few hypotheses turned out to be incorrect. I'm sure that there are many strange weather phenomena today that are not caused by climate change (although it is often a good starting hypothesis that should indeed be investigated)
A few years ago, I worked with a research project dealing with Niobium superconductors. Unfortunately, the conditions under which we were attempting to get the materials to superconduct ultimately prevented them from superconducting at all. Although this forced us to discard our original hypothesis and design proposal, we sure as hell didn't phone CERN to tell them that their Niobium accelerator was a lie.
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If an America company was smart (kodak comes to mind, but then, they are not very smart), they would follow the Fischer Pen approach and design a camera to survive in space, water, etc. and then advertise it as being rugged for space as well as water, camping, etc.
This is exactly what Hasselblad did.
Of course, Hasselblad products were already absurdly rugged (and expensive to match), so it's likely that very little additional engineering effort was required.
Did the Therac incidents teach us nothing?
Critical and non-critical systems should not be allowed to talk to each other unless absolutely necessary.
Even then, there should be no scenario in which pressing the brake pedal does not stop the car. No electrical signal or command should ever be able to override this action. Furthermore, given that the components are already networked, Toyota should have added a few lines of code to automatically stall the engine if the computer detects simultaneous inputs on the brake and gas pedals.
Aha. I stand corrected, and actually may upgrade once the next revision comes out! My other complaint with the product line is that Apple generally neglects updating it for long periods.
The thing about the RAM is that I felt that 2GB was "plenty" when I got my Core Duo mini. These days, it's plainly not enough. Even web browsers like to gobble up that much!
So a handful of patent lawsuits and a weirdly restrictive app store make a company "crazy evil?"
Pardon me if I can't quite hear Steve Jobs cackling in the background, but technology companies have been suing each other for patent violations as long as they have existed -- even our darlings at Novell are no strangers to being on the plaintiff's stand at patent hearings.
When they got successful with the iPod, they brought legal (and eventually drm-free) downloads to the masses -- great for artists and consumers alike. I'm not a fan of the proprietary format, so I shop at Amazon these days, although Apple certainly deserves credit where it's due for (finally) managing to get the industry on board for a sales model that wasn't entirely draconian. Without iTunes, there'd be no Amazon mp3 store.
The iPhone is also the most open platform to have ever reached a considerable portion of casual cell phone users, and spurred considerable innovation in the industry. Without the iPhone, there almost certainly would be no Android. Again, I don't own one because of the stupid app store policies, but it's not hard to acknowledge the effect it had on the marketplace. It really was the first smartphone that didn't completely suck.
Although Apple's ideas might not all be completely original, their talent scouts seem to have a knack for snatching up promising technologies, and incorporating them into successful products, largely influenced by their user-centric design and extensive usability testing. At the end of the day, this is really all that matters to the company -- it doesn't matter if the technology was invented in-house, purchased outright, or "inspired" by something else. After all, Jobs loves quoting Picasso: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
I put a 7200 RPM hard drive in my mini, and definitely appreciated the speed boost, so I can definitely see where you're coming from. (And unlike the SSD, I ended up increasing my internal storage capacity, and didn't go broke in the process)
Of course, my own personal pet peeve with the Mini is its absurdly maximum memory capacity -- 2gb on early Intel models, 4gb on more recent models. This is barely acceptable for a laptop, let alone a (tiny) desktop.
Somehow, I find it surprising that you're managing to saturate a modern hard drive via a single network connection. Are you running extremely slow PCs on a ridiculously fast network? The workflow that you describe sounds pretty normal for a design studio.
Mono is no longer "potentially encumbered."
At this point, the only risk with Mono is that Microsoft could fork the project into something that isn't free.
Hm... Here in DC and Baltimore, I've never seen a garage left open, despite a profound lack of such laws. Of course, I imagine that the reasons for this are quite different ;-)
Remember that separation of powers is quite extensive in the US. We have local, county, state, and federal laws to contend with. With the exception of defense and security, the federal government is quite limited in its scope, and has only really expanded over the past 50 years for a variety of fairly mundane technology-related reasons -- it makes sense that we only have one FDA and one NASA.
On the other hand, state (and especially local) laws have had the tendency to be draconian, overbearing, and rarely challenged in the courts. Ironically, most of the worst offenders in this area are extremely conservative constituencies.
A huge portion of the modern conservative and libertarian movement is simply the centuries-old states' rights camp in disguise.
And even that's not a great comparison. Microsoft have issued a legally-binding promise not to sue over C# patents in Mono. On the other hand, some of the other technologies you mentioned contain patents that are actively pursued by their holders.
You missed my point: Although I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's razor (Never ascribe to malice what you can to incompetence), I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that the same nation that put a man on the moon cannot figure out how to reliably or profitably run a train service between DC and Boston.
One can only conclude, then, that governmental regulation of the railroads was designed with the intent of strangling the rail industry. It's no secret that the government was in cahoots with the auto industry for a great many years (particularly when much of this regulation was put in place).
I do not believe that government regulation is intrinsically corrupt, although I do believe that it can be prone to poisoning, as was the case here. Virtually every rail network on the planet is nationalized, and all of America's peers (with the exception of Canada) have absolutely no problem making the trains run quickly and on time.
You can only use the word "arguably" for cases such as Amtrak, in which the agency has been deliberately mismanaged by small-government advocates looking to produce justification for their causes.
If people want to advocate for less government, they're welcome to do it. However, it would seem incredibly unwise to put those people at the helm of the remaining government services that we'd actually like to keep.
Not necessarily. For instance, Wal-Mart has implemented a number of "green" policies that have seriously helped their bottom line by improving the efficiency of their distribution network, cutting energy usage in their stores and warehouses by installing skylights, and using reusable shipping materials wherever possible.
There are many ways for businesses to "go green" and improve their profits.
Actually, the interior of your microwave would likely be one of the only places adequately shielded against the 2.4ghz radiation.
Banning DDT made sense in the US, because our Malaria rates are rather low, and we can afford the more expensive alternatives to DDT that don't interfere with local wildlife.
There was also quite a bit of hysteria at the time concerning its potential effect on humans, which was perhaps a good precaution to take, but ultimately unnecessary, as these claims were extensively debunked.
Wow. Sounds like they could really use a RAIL array....
Oh, for Christ sake.... will you people stop bashing DC for the snow debacle. The amount of snow that fell shattered every snowfall-related record in the books.
Criticizing DC for being unprepared for 40"+ inches of snow is akin to criticizing Chicago for being unprepared for an earthquake. I've spent most of my life up north in snowier climates, and can say with a high degree of certainty that both storms would have still been major events up there.
I'd imagine that Toyota's use of MATLAB is limited to product design, development, and simulation -- not actual production software in their cars. I used to write quite a bit of MATLAB code, and although it's great for the situations I just described, I can't possibly imagine wanting to use the language to do *anything* else.
If anything, they're using something like ADA or VHDL.
ZFS itself isn't exactly a performance screamer, although it offers some of the best volume management and redundancy options in the business. A few features (such as the ability to grow a raidz pool) are still waiting on the sidelines, although they are for the most part very competitive with what you'd get from an enterprise-grade RAID controller.
Of course, if you want high performance and redundancy, you'll still need to resort to one of those expensive RAID controllers, and something like iSCSI, which allows for graceful and transparent failover in the event of a hardware failure in the array itself.
So the lawyer thought they could win and was wrong. That somehow excuses them from being pricks by suing in the first place? You make it sound like the lawyer somehow forced Magic Jack to sue.
Yes. A good lawyer should have told them they had no chance of winning the lawsuit. Prosecuting a libel case in the US is extremely difficult even when the plaintiff has a legitimate case to make.
Actually, according to TFA, Apple's built-in toolkits (used by Aperture and Pixelmator) seem to be immune to this bug. Photoshop ceased being a mac-like application a very long time ago.
This is one of many reasons why creative professionals prefer macs over PCs --- and I'm not saying this as platform evangelism -- for one, you'd be hard pressed to disagree that Mac OS X's font-rendering, kerning, and anti-aliasing abilities are far superior to those provided by Windows when presented with side-by-side examples. It's lots of little things (many of which likely took the programmers a great deal of time to get right) that make the platform so nice to work with. Likewise, Adobe is quickly exhausting its remaining good will with the graphic design community, as recent Photoshop releases have declined significantly in quality, and have generally added little value to the application, as well as the abomination that is the Flash player.
I haven't checked Win7 yet, but as of Vista, Windows still presented windows-3.1-style dialog boxes when adding fonts. Although this is a fairly superficial example, it provides a great example of Microsoft's general neglect of its existing codebases. Once a feature becomes "stable," it rarely if ever gets refined or tweaked in subsequent releases, while poorly-integrated features get piled on top (although it must be said that when Microsoft finally does choose to overhaul part of the UI, they generally do a pretty good job of it. IE7 and 8 are notable exceptions, and actually seem to have been made intentionally confusing -- even the KDE, GIMP, and Blender folks would struggle to make a UI so cryptic, inconsistent, and foreign-looking)
Wait, what?
Back when it was introduced, ActiveX had no legitimate competitors. Although AJAX has considerably leveled the playing field, it's a fairly recent innovation compared to ActiveX (and also one that Microsoft pioneered).
Java was never really an option, given its tendency to be a resource hog when operating inside the browser, difficulty of interacting with non-java workflows and toolkits, and the fact that there simply weren't all that many Java developers around when ActiveX was first introduced.
For better or worse, most corporations use a Microsoft-based workflow, which made ActiveX an attractive option.
Look at this on the bright side -- the librarians at the National Archives won't have to strain their backs to lift and catalogue a tiny collection of 140-character messages. Must be a nice break next to the 5,000 page budget proposals they've gotten used to seeing.
I'm too lazy to do it again, but if you pull the numbers and do the math, the number of H1Bs that Microsoft employs is a rather small percentage of their total workforce.
In other words, Microsoft employs a ton of H1B visa holders because it has an absolutely massive overall number of employees. It's not particularly surprising that a company that engages in product development and basic research would require some foreign expertise. (Supporting this theory is that Microsoft's H1B applications have reportedly dropped at a rate that's roughly inversely proportional to the unemployment rate)
That all said, the H1B "problem" seems to be wildly blown out of proportion. The current law allows for 65,000 visas to be issued each year. In a country of 300 million people, 65,000 is really just a drop in the bucket (0.02% of the population, 0.04% of the labor force). Accounting for the total number of H1B holders is a bit more difficult, but even at 1 million (a wildly generous estimate), would still be less than 1% of the total workforce.
Also don't forget that there are plenty of Americans who work overseas. A degree of international mobility in the labor market is generally a good thing, as long as it's kept under reasonable control.
Find something else to complain about.
Any scientist dumb enough to falsify his results probably isn't smart enough to be doing science in the first place. I'd be inclined to ignore anything this guy says, both past and future.
Are you really all that shocked to learn that there are a few bad apples in any particular field or organization? (Recall the Acorn "esposé" that took the reporters several dozen attempts before somebody finally fell for the bait). A theory is NOT disproven just because a few select scientists were corrupt, or a few hypotheses turned out to be incorrect. I'm sure that there are many strange weather phenomena today that are not caused by climate change (although it is often a good starting hypothesis that should indeed be investigated)
A few years ago, I worked with a research project dealing with Niobium superconductors. Unfortunately, the conditions under which we were attempting to get the materials to superconduct ultimately prevented them from superconducting at all. Although this forced us to discard our original hypothesis and design proposal, we sure as hell didn't phone CERN to tell them that their Niobium accelerator was a lie.