I like the light that Halogen bulbs give off, but they also emit lots of far-ultraviolet radiation and can cause cancer without a UV cover. A friend of mine got cancer of the hand after many years of exposure doing intricate desk work.
"Apple's $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018," David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland, told The Washington Post. "That puts this company in perspective."
No it doesn't. Market cap is perceived company value. GDP is revenue. They are completely different things. Basically, something happened in the market and everybody wants to say something important about it, but there isn't really anything to say.
"They are the most successful company in history (at this exact moment)." Tomorrow may be different.
Don't go recruiting your mob of homeless people just yet. Your anger is directed at a minister who just walked into the job, and she is killing a project that you disagree with. Perhaps you should let her live.
The end of "cable TV" will be when the sports broadcasters start making deals with the over-the-top suppliers. Until that happens people will continue to pay telcos and telcos will continue to find creative bundling ways to take as much of our money as they can.
That whole industry is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
It would have been, yes. In fact, this pretty much describes Microsoft's entire business model (or it did until Satya took over). Let someone else innovate and then crush them like a bug when it is clear that whatever new technology is at hand is going to take off. Part of the dilemma is how to maintain your market lead when established companies decide to compete with you.
Phillips and Sony collaborated to bring the first commercially viable CD player to market in 1982. The Sony CDP-101 cost $730 USD or $1900.00 in today's dollars. I can't prove it, but reports suggest that none of Sony's early entries into this market were profitable. And yet, there is no doubt that CD players and the CD format became widely popular and immensely profitable. This is called the Innovator's Dilemma. Shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia page:
1. Value to innovation is an S-curve: Improving a product takes time and many iterations. The first of these iterations provide minimal value to the customer but in time the base is created and the value increases exponentially. Once the base is created then each iteration is drastically better than the last. At some point the most valuable improvements are complete and the value per iteration is minimal again. So in the middle is the most value, at the beginning and end the value is minimal. 2. Incumbent sized deals: The incumbent has the luxury of a huge customer set but high expectations of yearly sales. New entry next-generation products find niches away from the incumbent customer set to build the new product. The new entry companies do not require the yearly sales of the incumbent and thus have more time to focus and innovate on this smaller venture.
Uh okay. Except he was approached to help and said that he suspected that the Thai government had it under control:
"Elon Musk has said he is “happy to help” with the rescue of the Thai soccer team currently stuck in a cave.
The Tesla CEO was asked by a Twitter user if he could provide a helping hand with the recovery of the 12 boys and their coach who have been stuck in a Thai cave for nearly two weeks, and Musk replied in the affirmative a few hours later.
I suspect that the Thai govt has this under control, but I’m happy to help if there is a way to do so — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2018"
He *may* be getting high on his savior complex, but he was asked for help, he responded that he would but that he didn't think the Thai government needed it, and then you took to Slashdot.
Only the first servicing mission (STS-61) was to correct the flawed lenses. The rest were upgrades. The entire shuttle mission was devoted to the fix at a cost of $450M adjusted for inflation. Total cost is still under $500M or 1/20th of the Webb.
Look, I'm not saying that the Webb is not worth it. I'm just saying that the Hubble wasn't a boondoggle. It was cool science on a low budget that may have needed some fixes and upgrades, but it wasn't a boondoggle.
I'm old enough to remember the industrial revolution, but I don't remember the Hubble being an expensive boondoggle. It was delayed by the Challenger disaster and had to be powered up and kept in a clean room for three years which was costly, but that wasn't the fault of the project itself. When it was proposed Congress agreed to fully fund the program, but the Senate cut the budget by 50%, which was then made up by ESA.
If you have evidence that it was an expensive boondoggle, I'd like to see that. It cost $36M in 1978 ($287M adjusted for inflation). Webb is now close to $10B in 2018 (30x more expensive).
I think the Webb is an amazing machine, but if and when it goes up on a rocket I'll be holding my breath the launch system doesn't explode getting it there.
Dude, I think that is called a Leaf. Or Prius. If you want an electric econobox just go and buy one. You don't need to spend a premium on a Tesla if that is what you are after. The Tesla has the advantage of both a trunk and a frunk and rear seats that fold flat. I cannot imagine a situation where you would need to put shit in the passenger seat in such a way that it would potentially impact the display, but who knows?
The reason Tesla (and, you know, every other major auto manufacturer) is putting more and more controls onto touchscreens is because upgrading them doesn't require hardware hacking. Ford has Sync 3, GM has their own. Even Porsche which is 70 years of visceral buttons, gages, shifters, screaming engines and a boatload of marketing around "the feeling" are moving more and more controls to electronic ones (just check out the new Panamera). Or look at the dash in a new Audi TT. Or the HVAC controls on a modern VW.
I think the car you want already exists, but you should buy one soon before they disappear. Buttons in cars are like keyboards on phones. I love my Nokia E90, but it is getting harder and harder to buy a phone like that. Consumers are demanding smarter appliances (cars) and manufacturers are going to respond with appliances that have UIs that are more sophisticated than static buttons.
Finally, although I sympathize about your point about repairability, I'm not sure that buttons are more reliable. I had a headlight switch in a 1994 VW that I think I replaced 5 times over 12 years. I had an HVAC control in a Saturn jam up and stop working. I had one car that, over time, had all of the switches on the front seats fail (that was fun when it first happened while driving). I'm sure there are more. Frankly, I don't like switches in cars all that much. They aren't reliable. I think touchscreen impact-resistant glass will prove to be much more reliable in the long run. I guess we'll see.
You are correct, that is what I meant, but you have put it much better. The bottom line is that their model requires that they collect as much data on you as possible and then profile you to advertisers.
I tried to explain this to a friend recently. I believe that Apple tries its best to protect my privacy because its business model is selling devices. That is not Google's business model. If you think that you can protect your privacy while doing business with a company who's model is sell your data then you're dreaming.
I wish there was a good, third, open source alternative. Maybe Librem will see the light of day.
Stopped a guy recently to talk to him about his Onewheel. It works like a Segway, and has Tesla batteries in the deck and a fat wheel that gets you around on most terrain. Seems cool (but expensive). For some reason, personal transportation devices that don't have a stick with handlebars seem less intrusive to me, but I don't know. No way you'd catch me on a Bird or Segway, but I'd give the Onewheel a try.
When the bot called the hair salon it started the call by saying "Hi, I'm calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."
You can solve this problem by changing this to: "Hi, this is Alexa (or Google whatever) calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."
This will take the masses about 30 seconds to adapt to and we can dispense with all the drama. At this point there is no need for them to have different names.
Sometime in the future when they're sentient and want to talk to each other that will have to change.
In this particular case they seem to be bucking the silicon trend:
"At its annual Build conference Monday, Microsoft will suggest companies with big AI ambitions should steer clear of chips like Google’s. It says machine learning is evolving so fast that it doesn’t make sense to burn today’s ideas permanently into silicon chips that could soon prove limiting or obsolete."
Actually we haven't been here before. Although you bring up some good points, what is different this time is that a mature set of virtualization and orchestration tools combined with much more rigorous design around data centers gives us capability on-demand. The ability to be agile without a big up-front outlay of capital. Access to tons of APIs to help us get to EOJ faster. Why would you build your own shopping cart, streaming service, deep learning platform? You could (maybe), but you just don't need to now. You can focus on design more and hard hacking less.
Your assertion that the cloud will fail because of privacy and security would only be true in very specific circumstance. A particular cloud service could fail because of those things, but "the cloud" will not. Because, frankly, it is more private and more secure than you can achieve on your own unless you are a fortune 100 company. Data centers have sophisticated 2N or N+1 architectures with very expensive highly-resilient components like STSs, PDUs, ATSs, UPSs, backup generators, biometric scanners, man traps, vehicle traps, crash-proof fencing, redundant power sources, interconnection services, multiple carriers, etc. And cloud providers have environments that are pre-certified for things like PCI and HIPAA (you're still not off the hook but building a compliant environment yourself would be much harder). Cloud environments are inherently more private, more secure and more resilient.
My biggest concern with where we are going with all of this is the lack of ownership of anything. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have figured how to finally ensure you pay for their software forever and never actually own it. If you stop paying, it stops working. It's the licensing model combined with the distribution model that is screwing us over. I'm buying my music pressed onto vinyl again after a company decided I didn't actually own a bunch of the music I had purchased. We are being nickled and dimed to death and there is no escape.
In all seriousness, I've been buying their laptops for over a decade, and I have to tell you that they are now, suddenly, crap. If you've never tried typing on a new Macbook Pro keyboard (the ones in question) I encourage to try one out at an Apple store. It is *literally* like typing on a package of chicklets. They do this big sell job on you about how revolutionary the keys are now, but they don't move at all (well, not much anyway). If you think that the feeling of touch typing on your smartphone's screen is revolutionary, then you'll probably love them. If you still prefer buckling springs on your desktop keyboard then this is about as far away as you could possibly get from that.
I just had a go on a new Thinkpad and Lenovo seems to be going in the other direction - trying to get more travel in their keys. I don't know what Apple is smoking but they're about to throw away a very nice business. It used to be that the best Windows laptop you could buy was an Apple, now there is no way that would be true.
During the earnings call today Musk noted that transportation companies don't make decisions on purchasing semi's on how they look (or if they have wrap-around windshields). He also felt it was pretty ironic that a company with the name Nikola was suing Tesla.
Reading between the lines it sounds like even if Tesla had to modify its design it wouldn't have a material effect on their semi business because their customers don't actually care how they look. They are entirely coin operated.
When they rolled out their paid-for streaming service they killed off their free radio stations. I'm just wondering what is going to happen to news once they have a paid-for service.
Just a brief comment on this from one old guy to another.
For the same money I find that vinyl almost always sounds better, but not for the subjective reasons most people think. If you spend $300 on a CD player you get noise in the pre-amp and it doesn't matter how perfect the CD recording is, your equipment is junk (your audio equipment that is, old timer;) and you're going to hear hiss rather than beautiful nothingness between notes. That same $300 will get you an excellent turntable with a perfectly quiet pre-amp, and even though the recording medium may be inferior the music sounds better as a result. IMHO.
These days you have to spend a LOT of money on a CD player before it isn't crap (because most of them use the same cheap guts with just more BS "features" hacked on to justify increased costs.
Personally, I buy all my music on Vinyl now. Again, not because I think it sounds better, but because in most cases I get a physical asset that I OWN (with the lovely artwork and heft of the medium and all those good things), but more often than not I also get a download code so I ALSO get the convenience of a digital copy I don't have to create myself. If I'm traveling I can listen to the digital version, but at home I get to experience the wonderful sonorous version that has been stamped out on a petroleum product...
At my age, I'm lucky to have any hearing at all. I sort of miss the days when music was performance-only, recordings hadn't been invented yet, and nobody owned anything. But hey, this is progress. Sometimes it's better and sometimes it isn't.
This is excellent. I offset my current and future carbon emissions about 15 years ago buy buying a small forest property. There are also organizations like the Nature Conservancy that do something similar.
1. What is being described is typically the role of an Enterprise Architect. And this is why EAs should report to the board of directors, not into IT. Enterprise Architecture doesn't mean "Even Bigger Technical Architecture", it means "The Architecture of the Enterprise Itself". Corporate strategy (to the author's point) is about this overarching design (usually done against a framework).
2. If you want to have a successful organization you need to DESIGN the organization in such a way that the right people with the right ideas thrive in it. You need to change the ecosystem, not drain the pond (swamp), start over and hope for a different outcome next time.
For example: If you would like to change "Washington" you don't elect someone who says "I'm going to drain the swamp" because that is a proposed action, or possibly an outcome depending on your point of view. It is not a strategy.
A strategy is "diminish the effectiveness of corporate money-politics and corruption in Washington". An action is "I'm going to turn lobbying into boardroom presentations only". The outcome is "legislation is driven more by popular opinion rather than corporate interests".
Bottom line is that what he is discussing is the role of EA in an organization. Not sure why he doesn't mention it.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the light that Halogen bulbs give off, but they also emit lots of far-ultraviolet radiation and can cause cancer without a UV cover. A friend of mine got cancer of the hand after many years of exposure doing intricate desk work.
The sooner we can get rid of Halogen the better.
Agreed. And from the Slashdot synopsis:
"Apple's $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018," David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland, told The Washington Post. "That puts this company in perspective."
No it doesn't. Market cap is perceived company value. GDP is revenue. They are completely different things. Basically, something happened in the market and everybody wants to say something important about it, but there isn't really anything to say.
"They are the most successful company in history (at this exact moment)." Tomorrow may be different.
Don't go recruiting your mob of homeless people just yet. Your anger is directed at a minister who just walked into the job, and she is killing a project that you disagree with. Perhaps you should let her live.
The end of "cable TV" will be when the sports broadcasters start making deals with the over-the-top suppliers. Until that happens people will continue to pay telcos and telcos will continue to find creative bundling ways to take as much of our money as they can.
That whole industry is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
It would have been, yes. In fact, this pretty much describes Microsoft's entire business model (or it did until Satya took over). Let someone else innovate and then crush them like a bug when it is clear that whatever new technology is at hand is going to take off. Part of the dilemma is how to maintain your market lead when established companies decide to compete with you.
Phillips and Sony collaborated to bring the first commercially viable CD player to market in 1982. The Sony CDP-101 cost $730 USD or $1900.00 in today's dollars. I can't prove it, but reports suggest that none of Sony's early entries into this market were profitable. And yet, there is no doubt that CD players and the CD format became widely popular and immensely profitable. This is called the Innovator's Dilemma. Shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia page:
1. Value to innovation is an S-curve: Improving a product takes time and many iterations. The first of these iterations provide minimal value to the customer but in time the base is created and the value increases exponentially. Once the base is created then each iteration is drastically better than the last. At some point the most valuable improvements are complete and the value per iteration is minimal again. So in the middle is the most value, at the beginning and end the value is minimal.
2. Incumbent sized deals: The incumbent has the luxury of a huge customer set but high expectations of yearly sales. New entry next-generation products find niches away from the incumbent customer set to build the new product. The new entry companies do not require the yearly sales of the incumbent and thus have more time to focus and innovate on this smaller venture.
Sound like the auto industry right now?
Uh okay. Except he was approached to help and said that he suspected that the Thai government had it under control:
"Elon Musk has said he is “happy to help” with the rescue of the Thai soccer team currently stuck in a cave.
The Tesla CEO was asked by a Twitter user if he could provide a helping hand with the recovery of the 12 boys and their coach who have been stuck in a Thai cave for nearly two weeks, and Musk replied in the affirmative a few hours later.
I suspect that the Thai govt has this under control, but I’m happy to help if there is a way to do so
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2018"
He *may* be getting high on his savior complex, but he was asked for help, he responded that he would but that he didn't think the Thai government needed it, and then you took to Slashdot.
Wireheading was my first thought. Spider Robinson.
Only the first servicing mission (STS-61) was to correct the flawed lenses. The rest were upgrades. The entire shuttle mission was devoted to the fix at a cost of $450M adjusted for inflation. Total cost is still under $500M or 1/20th of the Webb.
Look, I'm not saying that the Webb is not worth it. I'm just saying that the Hubble wasn't a boondoggle. It was cool science on a low budget that may have needed some fixes and upgrades, but it wasn't a boondoggle.
I'm old enough to remember the industrial revolution, but I don't remember the Hubble being an expensive boondoggle. It was delayed by the Challenger disaster and had to be powered up and kept in a clean room for three years which was costly, but that wasn't the fault of the project itself. When it was proposed Congress agreed to fully fund the program, but the Senate cut the budget by 50%, which was then made up by ESA.
If you have evidence that it was an expensive boondoggle, I'd like to see that. It cost $36M in 1978 ($287M adjusted for inflation). Webb is now close to $10B in 2018 (30x more expensive).
I think the Webb is an amazing machine, but if and when it goes up on a rocket I'll be holding my breath the launch system doesn't explode getting it there.
Indeed. Our technological heroes are starting to pass. RIP Rob. You were and are missed.
Dude, I think that is called a Leaf. Or Prius. If you want an electric econobox just go and buy one. You don't need to spend a premium on a Tesla if that is what you are after. The Tesla has the advantage of both a trunk and a frunk and rear seats that fold flat. I cannot imagine a situation where you would need to put shit in the passenger seat in such a way that it would potentially impact the display, but who knows?
The reason Tesla (and, you know, every other major auto manufacturer) is putting more and more controls onto touchscreens is because upgrading them doesn't require hardware hacking. Ford has Sync 3, GM has their own. Even Porsche which is 70 years of visceral buttons, gages, shifters, screaming engines and a boatload of marketing around "the feeling" are moving more and more controls to electronic ones (just check out the new Panamera). Or look at the dash in a new Audi TT. Or the HVAC controls on a modern VW.
I think the car you want already exists, but you should buy one soon before they disappear. Buttons in cars are like keyboards on phones. I love my Nokia E90, but it is getting harder and harder to buy a phone like that. Consumers are demanding smarter appliances (cars) and manufacturers are going to respond with appliances that have UIs that are more sophisticated than static buttons.
Finally, although I sympathize about your point about repairability, I'm not sure that buttons are more reliable. I had a headlight switch in a 1994 VW that I think I replaced 5 times over 12 years. I had an HVAC control in a Saturn jam up and stop working. I had one car that, over time, had all of the switches on the front seats fail (that was fun when it first happened while driving). I'm sure there are more. Frankly, I don't like switches in cars all that much. They aren't reliable. I think touchscreen impact-resistant glass will prove to be much more reliable in the long run. I guess we'll see.
You are correct, that is what I meant, but you have put it much better. The bottom line is that their model requires that they collect as much data on you as possible and then profile you to advertisers.
I tried to explain this to a friend recently. I believe that Apple tries its best to protect my privacy because its business model is selling devices. That is not Google's business model. If you think that you can protect your privacy while doing business with a company who's model is sell your data then you're dreaming.
I wish there was a good, third, open source alternative. Maybe Librem will see the light of day.
Stopped a guy recently to talk to him about his Onewheel. It works like a Segway, and has Tesla batteries in the deck and a fat wheel that gets you around on most terrain. Seems cool (but expensive). For some reason, personal transportation devices that don't have a stick with handlebars seem less intrusive to me, but I don't know. No way you'd catch me on a Bird or Segway, but I'd give the Onewheel a try.
When the bot called the hair salon it started the call by saying "Hi, I'm calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."
You can solve this problem by changing this to: "Hi, this is Alexa (or Google whatever) calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."
This will take the masses about 30 seconds to adapt to and we can dispense with all the drama. At this point there is no need for them to have different names.
Sometime in the future when they're sentient and want to talk to each other that will have to change.
In this particular case they seem to be bucking the silicon trend:
"At its annual Build conference Monday, Microsoft will suggest companies with big AI ambitions should steer clear of chips like Google’s. It says machine learning is evolving so fast that it doesn’t make sense to burn today’s ideas permanently into silicon chips that could soon prove limiting or obsolete."
Hey!
Actually we haven't been here before. Although you bring up some good points, what is different this time is that a mature set of virtualization and orchestration tools combined with much more rigorous design around data centers gives us capability on-demand. The ability to be agile without a big up-front outlay of capital. Access to tons of APIs to help us get to EOJ faster. Why would you build your own shopping cart, streaming service, deep learning platform? You could (maybe), but you just don't need to now. You can focus on design more and hard hacking less.
Your assertion that the cloud will fail because of privacy and security would only be true in very specific circumstance. A particular cloud service could fail because of those things, but "the cloud" will not. Because, frankly, it is more private and more secure than you can achieve on your own unless you are a fortune 100 company. Data centers have sophisticated 2N or N+1 architectures with very expensive highly-resilient components like STSs, PDUs, ATSs, UPSs, backup generators, biometric scanners, man traps, vehicle traps, crash-proof fencing, redundant power sources, interconnection services, multiple carriers, etc. And cloud providers have environments that are pre-certified for things like PCI and HIPAA (you're still not off the hook but building a compliant environment yourself would be much harder). Cloud environments are inherently more private, more secure and more resilient.
My biggest concern with where we are going with all of this is the lack of ownership of anything. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have figured how to finally ensure you pay for their software forever and never actually own it. If you stop paying, it stops working. It's the licensing model combined with the distribution model that is screwing us over. I'm buying my music pressed onto vinyl again after a company decided I didn't actually own a bunch of the music I had purchased. We are being nickled and dimed to death and there is no escape.
In all seriousness, I've been buying their laptops for over a decade, and I have to tell you that they are now, suddenly, crap. If you've never tried typing on a new Macbook Pro keyboard (the ones in question) I encourage to try one out at an Apple store. It is *literally* like typing on a package of chicklets. They do this big sell job on you about how revolutionary the keys are now, but they don't move at all (well, not much anyway). If you think that the feeling of touch typing on your smartphone's screen is revolutionary, then you'll probably love them. If you still prefer buckling springs on your desktop keyboard then this is about as far away as you could possibly get from that.
I just had a go on a new Thinkpad and Lenovo seems to be going in the other direction - trying to get more travel in their keys. I don't know what Apple is smoking but they're about to throw away a very nice business. It used to be that the best Windows laptop you could buy was an Apple, now there is no way that would be true.
During the earnings call today Musk noted that transportation companies don't make decisions on purchasing semi's on how they look (or if they have wrap-around windshields). He also felt it was pretty ironic that a company with the name Nikola was suing Tesla.
Reading between the lines it sounds like even if Tesla had to modify its design it wouldn't have a material effect on their semi business because their customers don't actually care how they look. They are entirely coin operated.
When they rolled out their paid-for streaming service they killed off their free radio stations. I'm just wondering what is going to happen to news once they have a paid-for service.
Just a brief comment on this from one old guy to another.
For the same money I find that vinyl almost always sounds better, but not for the subjective reasons most people think. If you spend $300 on a CD player you get noise in the pre-amp and it doesn't matter how perfect the CD recording is, your equipment is junk (your audio equipment that is, old timer ;) and you're going to hear hiss rather than beautiful nothingness between notes. That same $300 will get you an excellent turntable with a perfectly quiet pre-amp, and even though the recording medium may be inferior the music sounds better as a result. IMHO.
These days you have to spend a LOT of money on a CD player before it isn't crap (because most of them use the same cheap guts with just more BS "features" hacked on to justify increased costs.
Personally, I buy all my music on Vinyl now. Again, not because I think it sounds better, but because in most cases I get a physical asset that I OWN (with the lovely artwork and heft of the medium and all those good things), but more often than not I also get a download code so I ALSO get the convenience of a digital copy I don't have to create myself. If I'm traveling I can listen to the digital version, but at home I get to experience the wonderful sonorous version that has been stamped out on a petroleum product...
At my age, I'm lucky to have any hearing at all. I sort of miss the days when music was performance-only, recordings hadn't been invented yet, and nobody owned anything. But hey, this is progress. Sometimes it's better and sometimes it isn't.
This is excellent. I offset my current and future carbon emissions about 15 years ago buy buying a small forest property. There are also organizations like the Nature Conservancy that do something similar.
1. What is being described is typically the role of an Enterprise Architect. And this is why EAs should report to the board of directors, not into IT. Enterprise Architecture doesn't mean "Even Bigger Technical Architecture", it means "The Architecture of the Enterprise Itself". Corporate strategy (to the author's point) is about this overarching design (usually done against a framework).
2. If you want to have a successful organization you need to DESIGN the organization in such a way that the right people with the right ideas thrive in it. You need to change the ecosystem, not drain the pond (swamp), start over and hope for a different outcome next time.
For example: If you would like to change "Washington" you don't elect someone who says "I'm going to drain the swamp" because that is a proposed action, or possibly an outcome depending on your point of view. It is not a strategy.
A strategy is "diminish the effectiveness of corporate money-politics and corruption in Washington". An action is "I'm going to turn lobbying into boardroom presentations only". The outcome is "legislation is driven more by popular opinion rather than corporate interests".
Bottom line is that what he is discussing is the role of EA in an organization. Not sure why he doesn't mention it.