And again, a basic software axiom has again been proved true:
"When you build a piece of software to be idiot-proof, your user base will find a way to build a better idiot."
They weren't brought down by anything as prosaic as a bug... they lost money because they completely ignored the output from a system specially designed to warn them of activity like this.
ANY time you read some Free Energy loon complain about shadowy international conspiracies to supress their world-changing invention, you can usually just write him/her off.
If you have a legit invention, protecting your precious secret from all these shadowy forces is easy; you file a patent, the whole world can then read exactly how to perform your miracle. You rake in the profits by licensing it, and it's impossible for The Man to put the genie back into the bottle.
If, on the other hand, you are a thinly transparent scammer, you leave everything black boxed, talk about vast forces arrayed against you, and then perform a few tricks meant to fool credulous marks...err... "investors."
He had pancreatic cancer, a disease that makes AIDS look like the freaking common cold. It's an amazing testament to medicine that he lived as long as he did; most people don't last a year after diagnosis.
Technically, since he lived more than five years, he counts as a cancer "survivor."
Here in the U.S, legislators have immunity from liability for official acts (as in, they cannot be sued or prosecuted for voting for a law that turns out to be illegal), and their offices cannot be searched without a warrant, even though the offices are govt. property. Their files have some limited legal privilege. Lastly, they cannot be detained on the way to attend a session of Congress.
That's it.
If they commit a crime, they can be charged and prosecuted just like any other citizen.
The A380 can evacuate 873 people in 77 seconds, yes. When the plane is on the ground, not moving, all emergency exit doors are in use, and people are wearing nothing but their clothing. (And those evac speed tests are done in a hangar by volunteers in no danger.) And isn't there a somewhat high rate of people "chickening out" of a 1st jump? And those are people that signed up to jump out of an airplane! How long do you think it'll take to evacuate the aircraft when you have a bunch of people who are terrified into near catatonia blocking the exit and the rest are waddling around with a huge backpack?
No, I haven't jumped out of a plane... but isn't hitting the tail a possible danger when you jump out of a plane not designed to be a jump plane? Also, the stall speed of a commercial airliner is a bit higher than a plane designed for jumping. How safe is it to jump out of an ordinary passenger aircraft at 160kts?
Reading on the JAL 123 incident, it appears that during much of that 32 minutes, the plane was not controllable; hardly a good time to try and get a bunch of panicked awkwardly burdened people out of an aircraft with seats, debris, injured passengers, etc. all over the place.
"It's obvious that parachutes won't help in every situation." It'll help in almost NO situations. If the plane is flying stable and level over ground suitable for novice parachuting, then the plane can probably, you know, actually land. And the plane is a LOT sturdier than a pile of terrified people jumping out of a plane in distress.
Life jackets are useful in far more situations... 1) If the plane goes down over the ocean, you are going to need the life jackets to have a non-zero chance of survival. Period. End of story. 2) Lots of airports (and plane routes) are located near coasts, bays, large lakes, ocean, etc. All that flat water makes for a fair (if not great) place to set a plane down in an emergency. 3) Life jackets are cheap, can be used untrained, require no maintenance, and weigh about a pound a piece.
Parachutes: 1) Can only be used with reasonable safety over ground almost equally suitable for an emergency landing. While certainly there are fatalities in most controlled emergency landings on ground other than a runway, I'd say they are probably a lot less than if you tried to get hundreds of panicked and untrained peopleon the ground via parachutes. 2) Weigh a lot. The lightest I found online were 15lb-ish a piece. That doesn't sound like a lot, but adding that much weight to the aircraft would have significant consequences to range, and cargo/pax capacity. 3) Must be periodically re-packed, at no small expense. 4) Are expensive. 5) Are bulky. Over-wing exits aren't exactly gigantic portals to begin with. 6) Spread the passengers over a huge area; you'd probably lose quite a few due to untreated injuries sustained on landing, exposure, thirst, etc. How are you going to FIND them? Radio beacons make for even more weight, expense, and maintenance. If the plane is in a civilized area where passengers could just call 911 from their cell on landing, then there probably would have been a place to land the plane.
Given that most accidents occur at altitudes utterly useless for a parachute evacuation, it seems to be a foolish safety measure. If you ask a pilot what he'd like if he had a 2+ tons to spend on safety, I guarantee they'd virtually all say they want more JET A.
First, you aren't spiraling towards the ground at thousands of feet per second. Check your math.
You wouldn't make it out the door of the plane. At a high-altitude, when you'd still have a few minutes to escape, you can't open the door due to the pressure difference. (For obvious reasons, it's completely impossible to open the door at altitude.) Once you get low enough to open the door, the air will be dense enough that the plane will almost certainly be a bit unstable and you'd have a tough time making it to the exit. On the off-chance you went through it (fighting your way through the scrum of all these people wearing ungainly heavy parachutes), the wind forces would probably snap your body in two against the door frame. If you make it out the door, you'll need to avoid the tail.
I'd be shocked, that out of an entire plane, a half-dozen made it to the ground alive.
But none of that matters... why? Because most accidents take place near takeoff, landing, and taxi, which is when parachutes would be utterly useless due to the fact you are going to hit the ground well before anybody but the pilots have time to do anything about it.
If you are going to spend a truly hideous amount of weight on safety measures (parachutes are HEAVY), there are lot better places to put it.
Black lights use filter glass in addition to the different phosphor. UV lights that just change the phosphor are used as bug lights (the light-blue you see in bug zappers); but the parts of the visible spectrum those emit is too bright to be used as black lights.
No, I didn't use the Kindle for normal web-browsing. However, the mobilread website produces a list of free e-books as a Kindle book. The way it worked was you downloaded the master list once. It was an ebook that had a bunch of hyperlinks in it. When you found the book you wanted, you just selected they hyperlink and it would use the web browsing feature to download the ebook file you wanted. (As an added bonus, the cover of the master list contained the permalink to the latest copy, so you could update your list any time you wanted.)
I've used this feature since the first Kindle; it was a nice way to get free ebooks. I suppose it's not such a big deal now, as Amazon itself now carries a lot of those same books for free.
And yes, the submitter bitching about how the $79 model doesn't have a touch-based keyboard is an idiot. No $hit, Sherlock. That's why they have models called "Kindle Keyboard" and "Kindle Touch." Did you think the bottom-end model was going to read your mind?
If you want a touchscreen keyboard, they'll sell you a model with one for not a lot of additional money. Amazon's made it perfectly clear that there is no keyboard with their dirt-cheap $79 device. The device holds enough reading to last for years, so what do you need the keyboard for? This model is designed so you buy your books with a computer and then retrieve them on the device the next time you have a wi-fi connection. (Or, if you are the bestseller-reading type, you don't need a keyboard to buy books, the four-way controller will be just fine for scrolling down the list and hitting "buy".) If you don't like that, there are plenty of Kindle models to buy that will take care of you.
Sorry; you do not have special UV-sensitive super-powers. So-called "black" lights are not, by any stretch of the imagination, UV-only. They have a filter on them that blocks most, but not all, visible light. They are called "black" lights because the UV causes appropriately fluorescent and phosphorescent materials to glow out of proportion to the visible light emitted by the bulb.
When it comes to computer parts, Amazon's website is a freaking disaster zone. NewEgg's search engine has a few quirks, but it's still way better than Amazon's. And I don't find Amazon's pricing to be significantly cheaper, and their free shipping is WAAAYYY slower.
Interestingly enough, the local "CompUSA" store (formerly TigerDirect Outlet) has prices that are usually within a buck or two of NewEgg, and I can have my part NOW. The place is a poorly-organized dump, but as long as they have the part I need, I'm not that picky.
Computer Science is just that: science. It involves the theory behind the operation of computer systems. Computer Science concerns itself with low-level algorithms (as opposed to business logic), the nitty-gritty of data structures, language theory and design, etc. Computer Scientists are trained to build Operating Systems and Database programs, while IT specialists use those systems to solve business problems. There are many specialties within IT, and a very large one is database application programming. (Indeed, measured by volume of code, something like 90-95%% of running software is database applications; there are a lot more database applications out there than there are OS'es.)
There is some overlap between the two fields, to be sure, especially when you are designing a complex database, but for the most part the two fields don't intersect. It is true that many CS grads go on to be IT programmers, but this isn't necessarily bad, a waste of skills, or even a downgrade in pay, depending on what you are doing.
It's a truism that almost all parents tell their kids not to have sex before marriage.
And most of them failed to heed this advice. Proof: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is caught by approx. 50% of the sexually active U.S. population at some point in their lives. If significant number people actually practiced lifetime monogamy, it wouldn't be so common.
Red Hat: Tiny, tiny, tiny compared to HP. And how could HP emulate them? Rolling their own Linux server distro? Opensourcing HP-UX? (If Sun was late, that would make HP even later.) Throw their weight behind desktop Linux? How would that improve their profits? Red Hat abandoned desktop Linux, and if Red Hat is small, Canonical is even smaller...
IBM: IBM backs open source for purely pragmatic reasons. Customers demand Linux, IBM provides it (just as HP does also, incidentally.) IBM's other open source efforts (i.e. Eclipse) are laudable, but they could hardly be regarded as "company saving."
This became a well-settled area of law when lawsuits by Scientology drove the Cult Awareness Network into bankruptcy. The Scientologists were able to get a hold of CAN's confidential files in the BK, despite strenuous objections by many parties.
If those files can't be protected, I don't see your book purchasing habits at Borders being particularly sarconsact.
It doesn't make any sense to say that the OEM'd LaserJet was the beginning of HP's downfall when it's the only part of HP that is working well right now! And Carly, via her doubling-down on the PC and commodity server business by buying Compaq, can most certainly be blamed. It's tough for one company to do well in both Enterprise high-dollar HW/Services markets and simultaneously do well in commodity/consumer markets. They took their eye off the ball and are suffering from a leaderless morass in both markets right now. Just ask IBM, Apple, and Cisco how well that works. (MS pulls it off, sorta, but they haven't exactly been thriving the last few years either.)
BTW, the House that Bill and Dave built still exists; it's called Agilent.
Steve Jobs was a "Computer Guy", and Lee Iaccoca was a "Car Guy."
Lou Gerstner was a Snack Food and Cigarette Guy. He was brought in from the outside to run a flailing technology giant. (And one in the same market position; IBM was the #1 in Revenue IT company then, and that's where HP is now.) IBM, too, was on the verge of splitting up into smaller pieces.
eBay was a fast-growing company with a near-monopoly in their market. HP is a mature giant that is flailing for direction and leadership.
Somebody whose major skill is "getting out of the way" is going to ride HP into pathetic oblivion, joining other once-great IT companies like DEC. (Which, incidentally, HP currently owns the remains of.) HP needs major change and a leadership infusion and it needs it last year.
Firstly, the CEO of a company like HP deals with C-level executives of companies they are trying to sell many millions of dollars of gear and services to all the time. Meeting with client upper management is one of the bedrocks of the CEO's job with companies that sell to other large companies. In fact, I'd say that the CEO's of enterprise companies have MORE interaction with their customers than a company like eBay.
No, they don't absolutely have to have "shop floor" experience, knowledge of the industry, or ability to talk to customers. When Lou Gerstner was brought in to run IBM, it was in a similar spot: fired CEO, leadership vacuum, tanking financials, etc. (Actually, IBM's financials were even worse off; they had just announced their first annual loss in company history. OTOH, IBM had more low-hanging fruit of bloated inefficiencies than HP does at this time.) His previous job was running a company whose primary products were snack foods and cigarettes; he managed to rescue IBM from near-certain oblivion. It was a gutsy move by IBM's board that paid off. If Meg can do something similar, more power to her, but it's a risky move.
One of Gerstner's first moves when taking over IBM was to put the kibosh on the split-up of the company, which had been planned, but not executed. I wonder if the next CEO of HP will do the same. (Of course, IBM was discussing a spin-off, HP has merely made vague noises about a sale and/or spinoff and/or ???)
The vast majority of HP's revenue comes from enterprise markets, which Meg Whitman has zero experience with. Any experience she might have had dealing with end users kind of got a bit less important when HP decided to ambiguously throw the PC division under the bus. HP makes both eBay and Dreamworks look like tiny, insignificant companies. And eBay already had pretty much a monopoly in online auctions since day one; all she did there was not screw it up. (She also bought PayPal, which turned out well, and Skype, which didn't.) By the time she left eBay, as a mature company, it was adrift with no path to growth. HP is already a mature company and any growth is going to have to come the hard way, which she doesn't have any experience with.
I'm not saying she can't pull it off, just that she has no background in HP's primary markets to help her along.
And it wasn't Leo that broke HP. That started with Carly, continued with Chainsaw Mark, and we simply have no idea what would have happened with Leo, since he hasn't had the job that long.
Yes, IBM's enterprise machines, up until recently, let you run no alternative OS. But the IBM PC has been open from day one. You've always been allowed to run alternate OS'es on your PC. You thought Microsoft "let" you run alternate OS'es? They did not then, and do not now, own the PC HW architecture. It was IBM's openness that let you do this, not Microsoft's.
(IBM did try to keep some of the particulars of the BIOS secret to prevent PC clones, but it was swiftly reverse-engineered and IBM did not stop it, despite the long-demonstrated ability to have their lawyers crush the opposition.)
I never suggested otherwise (or at least didn't mean to). The linked article suggests it's possible even while trying to state it isn't... there's nothing conclusive about it. I think EMF can effect mood. I don't know that wifi is enough to do it.
You said: "Majority can't tell = a minority CAN"
What you SHOULD have said was: "Majority can't tell = a minority MAY"
Of course, that isn't really correct case either, as the word "majority" referred to studies in the GP, not people.
Slashdot Mirror
And again, a basic software axiom has again been proved true:
"When you build a piece of software to be idiot-proof, your user base will find a way to build a better idiot."
They weren't brought down by anything as prosaic as a bug... they lost money because they completely ignored the output from a system specially designed to warn them of activity like this.
ANY time you read some Free Energy loon complain about shadowy international conspiracies to supress their world-changing invention, you can usually just write him/her off.
If you have a legit invention, protecting your precious secret from all these shadowy forces is easy; you file a patent, the whole world can then read exactly how to perform your miracle. You rake in the profits by licensing it, and it's impossible for The Man to put the genie back into the bottle.
If, on the other hand, you are a thinly transparent scammer, you leave everything black boxed, talk about vast forces arrayed against you, and then perform a few tricks meant to fool credulous marks...err... "investors."
He had pancreatic cancer, a disease that makes AIDS look like the freaking common cold. It's an amazing testament to medicine that he lived as long as he did; most people don't last a year after diagnosis.
Technically, since he lived more than five years, he counts as a cancer "survivor."
The mind boggles.
Here in the U.S, legislators have immunity from liability for official acts (as in, they cannot be sued or prosecuted for voting for a law that turns out to be illegal), and their offices cannot be searched without a warrant, even though the offices are govt. property. Their files have some limited legal privilege. Lastly, they cannot be detained on the way to attend a session of Congress.
That's it.
If they commit a crime, they can be charged and prosecuted just like any other citizen.
The A380 can evacuate 873 people in 77 seconds, yes. When the plane is on the ground, not moving, all emergency exit doors are in use, and people are wearing nothing but their clothing. (And those evac speed tests are done in a hangar by volunteers in no danger.) And isn't there a somewhat high rate of people "chickening out" of a 1st jump? And those are people that signed up to jump out of an airplane! How long do you think it'll take to evacuate the aircraft when you have a bunch of people who are terrified into near catatonia blocking the exit and the rest are waddling around with a huge backpack?
No, I haven't jumped out of a plane... but isn't hitting the tail a possible danger when you jump out of a plane not designed to be a jump plane? Also, the stall speed of a commercial airliner is a bit higher than a plane designed for jumping. How safe is it to jump out of an ordinary passenger aircraft at 160kts?
Reading on the JAL 123 incident, it appears that during much of that 32 minutes, the plane was not controllable; hardly a good time to try and get a bunch of panicked awkwardly burdened people out of an aircraft with seats, debris, injured passengers, etc. all over the place.
"It's obvious that parachutes won't help in every situation." It'll help in almost NO situations. If the plane is flying stable and level over ground suitable for novice parachuting, then the plane can probably, you know, actually land. And the plane is a LOT sturdier than a pile of terrified people jumping out of a plane in distress.
Life jackets are useful in far more situations...
1) If the plane goes down over the ocean, you are going to need the life jackets to have a non-zero chance of survival. Period. End of story.
2) Lots of airports (and plane routes) are located near coasts, bays, large lakes, ocean, etc. All that flat water makes for a fair (if not great) place to set a plane down in an emergency.
3) Life jackets are cheap, can be used untrained, require no maintenance, and weigh about a pound a piece.
Parachutes:
1) Can only be used with reasonable safety over ground almost equally suitable for an emergency landing. While certainly there are fatalities in most controlled emergency landings on ground other than a runway, I'd say they are probably a lot less than if you tried to get hundreds of panicked and untrained peopleon the ground via parachutes.
2) Weigh a lot. The lightest I found online were 15lb-ish a piece. That doesn't sound like a lot, but adding that much weight to the aircraft would have significant consequences to range, and cargo/pax capacity.
3) Must be periodically re-packed, at no small expense.
4) Are expensive.
5) Are bulky. Over-wing exits aren't exactly gigantic portals to begin with.
6) Spread the passengers over a huge area; you'd probably lose quite a few due to untreated injuries sustained on landing, exposure, thirst, etc. How are you going to FIND them? Radio beacons make for even more weight, expense, and maintenance. If the plane is in a civilized area where passengers could just call 911 from their cell on landing, then there probably would have been a place to land the plane.
Given that most accidents occur at altitudes utterly useless for a parachute evacuation, it seems to be a foolish safety measure. If you ask a pilot what he'd like if he had a 2+ tons to spend on safety, I guarantee they'd virtually all say they want more JET A.
First, you aren't spiraling towards the ground at thousands of feet per second. Check your math.
You wouldn't make it out the door of the plane. At a high-altitude, when you'd still have a few minutes to escape, you can't open the door due to the pressure difference. (For obvious reasons, it's completely impossible to open the door at altitude.) Once you get low enough to open the door, the air will be dense enough that the plane will almost certainly be a bit unstable and you'd have a tough time making it to the exit. On the off-chance you went through it (fighting your way through the scrum of all these people wearing ungainly heavy parachutes), the wind forces would probably snap your body in two against the door frame. If you make it out the door, you'll need to avoid the tail.
I'd be shocked, that out of an entire plane, a half-dozen made it to the ground alive.
But none of that matters... why? Because most accidents take place near takeoff, landing, and taxi, which is when parachutes would be utterly useless due to the fact you are going to hit the ground well before anybody but the pilots have time to do anything about it.
If you are going to spend a truly hideous amount of weight on safety measures (parachutes are HEAVY), there are lot better places to put it.
Black lights use filter glass in addition to the different phosphor. UV lights that just change the phosphor are used as bug lights (the light-blue you see in bug zappers); but the parts of the visible spectrum those emit is too bright to be used as black lights.
No, I didn't use the Kindle for normal web-browsing. However, the mobilread website produces a list of free e-books as a Kindle book. The way it worked was you downloaded the master list once. It was an ebook that had a bunch of hyperlinks in it. When you found the book you wanted, you just selected they hyperlink and it would use the web browsing feature to download the ebook file you wanted. (As an added bonus, the cover of the master list contained the permalink to the latest copy, so you could update your list any time you wanted.)
I've used this feature since the first Kindle; it was a nice way to get free ebooks. I suppose it's not such a big deal now, as Amazon itself now carries a lot of those same books for free.
And yes, the submitter bitching about how the $79 model doesn't have a touch-based keyboard is an idiot. No $hit, Sherlock. That's why they have models called "Kindle Keyboard" and "Kindle Touch." Did you think the bottom-end model was going to read your mind?
If you want a touchscreen keyboard, they'll sell you a model with one for not a lot of additional money. Amazon's made it perfectly clear that there is no keyboard with their dirt-cheap $79 device. The device holds enough reading to last for years, so what do you need the keyboard for? This model is designed so you buy your books with a computer and then retrieve them on the device the next time you have a wi-fi connection. (Or, if you are the bestseller-reading type, you don't need a keyboard to buy books, the four-way controller will be just fine for scrolling down the list and hitting "buy".) If you don't like that, there are plenty of Kindle models to buy that will take care of you.
Sorry; you do not have special UV-sensitive super-powers. So-called "black" lights are not, by any stretch of the imagination, UV-only. They have a filter on them that blocks most, but not all, visible light. They are called "black" lights because the UV causes appropriately fluorescent and phosphorescent materials to glow out of proportion to the visible light emitted by the bulb.
When it comes to computer parts, Amazon's website is a freaking disaster zone. NewEgg's search engine has a few quirks, but it's still way better than Amazon's. And I don't find Amazon's pricing to be significantly cheaper, and their free shipping is WAAAYYY slower.
Interestingly enough, the local "CompUSA" store (formerly TigerDirect Outlet) has prices that are usually within a buck or two of NewEgg, and I can have my part NOW. The place is a poorly-organized dump, but as long as they have the part I need, I'm not that picky.
Computer Science is just that: science. It involves the theory behind the operation of computer systems. Computer Science concerns itself with low-level algorithms (as opposed to business logic), the nitty-gritty of data structures, language theory and design, etc. Computer Scientists are trained to build Operating Systems and Database programs, while IT specialists use those systems to solve business problems. There are many specialties within IT, and a very large one is database application programming. (Indeed, measured by volume of code, something like 90-95%% of running software is database applications; there are a lot more database applications out there than there are OS'es.)
There is some overlap between the two fields, to be sure, especially when you are designing a complex database, but for the most part the two fields don't intersect. It is true that many CS grads go on to be IT programmers, but this isn't necessarily bad, a waste of skills, or even a downgrade in pay, depending on what you are doing.
It's a truism that almost all parents tell their kids not to have sex before marriage.
And most of them failed to heed this advice. Proof: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is caught by approx. 50% of the sexually active U.S. population at some point in their lives. If significant number people actually practiced lifetime monogamy, it wouldn't be so common.
Red Hat: Tiny, tiny, tiny compared to HP. And how could HP emulate them? Rolling their own Linux server distro? Opensourcing HP-UX? (If Sun was late, that would make HP even later.) Throw their weight behind desktop Linux? How would that improve their profits? Red Hat abandoned desktop Linux, and if Red Hat is small, Canonical is even smaller...
IBM: IBM backs open source for purely pragmatic reasons. Customers demand Linux, IBM provides it (just as HP does also, incidentally.) IBM's other open source efforts (i.e. Eclipse) are laudable, but they could hardly be regarded as "company saving."
Lou Platt came up with the Agilent divesture. Carly's baby was the Compaq acquisition.
This became a well-settled area of law when lawsuits by Scientology drove the Cult Awareness Network into bankruptcy. The Scientologists were able to get a hold of CAN's confidential files in the BK, despite strenuous objections by many parties.
If those files can't be protected, I don't see your book purchasing habits at Borders being particularly sarconsact.
It doesn't make any sense to say that the OEM'd LaserJet was the beginning of HP's downfall when it's the only part of HP that is working well right now! And Carly, via her doubling-down on the PC and commodity server business by buying Compaq, can most certainly be blamed. It's tough for one company to do well in both Enterprise high-dollar HW/Services markets and simultaneously do well in commodity/consumer markets. They took their eye off the ball and are suffering from a leaderless morass in both markets right now. Just ask IBM, Apple, and Cisco how well that works. (MS pulls it off, sorta, but they haven't exactly been thriving the last few years either.)
BTW, the House that Bill and Dave built still exists; it's called Agilent.
Steve Jobs was a "Computer Guy", and Lee Iaccoca was a "Car Guy."
Lou Gerstner was a Snack Food and Cigarette Guy. He was brought in from the outside to run a flailing technology giant. (And one in the same market position; IBM was the #1 in Revenue IT company then, and that's where HP is now.) IBM, too, was on the verge of splitting up into smaller pieces.
eBay was a fast-growing company with a near-monopoly in their market. HP is a mature giant that is flailing for direction and leadership.
Somebody whose major skill is "getting out of the way" is going to ride HP into pathetic oblivion, joining other once-great IT companies like DEC. (Which, incidentally, HP currently owns the remains of.) HP needs major change and a leadership infusion and it needs it last year.
Firstly, the CEO of a company like HP deals with C-level executives of companies they are trying to sell many millions of dollars of gear and services to all the time. Meeting with client upper management is one of the bedrocks of the CEO's job with companies that sell to other large companies. In fact, I'd say that the CEO's of enterprise companies have MORE interaction with their customers than a company like eBay.
No, they don't absolutely have to have "shop floor" experience, knowledge of the industry, or ability to talk to customers. When Lou Gerstner was brought in to run IBM, it was in a similar spot: fired CEO, leadership vacuum, tanking financials, etc. (Actually, IBM's financials were even worse off; they had just announced their first annual loss in company history. OTOH, IBM had more low-hanging fruit of bloated inefficiencies than HP does at this time.) His previous job was running a company whose primary products were snack foods and cigarettes; he managed to rescue IBM from near-certain oblivion. It was a gutsy move by IBM's board that paid off. If Meg can do something similar, more power to her, but it's a risky move.
One of Gerstner's first moves when taking over IBM was to put the kibosh on the split-up of the company, which had been planned, but not executed. I wonder if the next CEO of HP will do the same. (Of course, IBM was discussing a spin-off, HP has merely made vague noises about a sale and/or spinoff and/or ???)
The vast majority of HP's revenue comes from enterprise markets, which Meg Whitman has zero experience with. Any experience she might have had dealing with end users kind of got a bit less important when HP decided to ambiguously throw the PC division under the bus. HP makes both eBay and Dreamworks look like tiny, insignificant companies. And eBay already had pretty much a monopoly in online auctions since day one; all she did there was not screw it up. (She also bought PayPal, which turned out well, and Skype, which didn't.) By the time she left eBay, as a mature company, it was adrift with no path to growth. HP is already a mature company and any growth is going to have to come the hard way, which she doesn't have any experience with.
I'm not saying she can't pull it off, just that she has no background in HP's primary markets to help her along.
And it wasn't Leo that broke HP. That started with Carly, continued with Chainsaw Mark, and we simply have no idea what would have happened with Leo, since he hasn't had the job that long.
You are right, of course. I had forgotten about the Clean Room workaround.
Yes, IBM's enterprise machines, up until recently, let you run no alternative OS. But the IBM PC has been open from day one. You've always been allowed to run alternate OS'es on your PC. You thought Microsoft "let" you run alternate OS'es? They did not then, and do not now, own the PC HW architecture. It was IBM's openness that let you do this, not Microsoft's.
(IBM did try to keep some of the particulars of the BIOS secret to prevent PC clones, but it was swiftly reverse-engineered and IBM did not stop it, despite the long-demonstrated ability to have their lawyers crush the opposition.)
I never suggested otherwise (or at least didn't mean to). The linked article suggests it's possible even while trying to state it isn't... there's nothing conclusive about it. I think EMF can effect mood. I don't know that wifi is enough to do it.
You said: "Majority can't tell = a minority CAN"
What you SHOULD have said was: "Majority can't tell = a minority MAY"
Of course, that isn't really correct case either, as the word "majority" referred to studies in the GP, not people.
In other news, I'm going to sell my entire stock of pink unicorns for fifty cents each.
And I have as many pink unicorns as FusionGarage has $200 tablets that don't 100% suck.