People buy apple because it's in vogue to own apple products.
Or because they want a product which isn't overly fiddly to use and which does what they want. For years, Microsoft over-promised, and under-delivered, which is why many of us started using Linux and other alternatives in the first place.
Since I was already using iTunes, it was a no-brainer for me. Everything was ready to go in about 5 minutes.
Tablets don't have much use period.
Define 'use'? I can do everything on a tablet that can be done on a smart phone (if you have a smart phone, you probably don't need a tablet -- for those of us who don't want/have smart phones, the tablet is a better choice due to screen size).
But when I travel, I get a lot of use out of my iPad -- movies on the plane, checking Gmail in the airport and hotel, Google voice calls to the wife, and video games to pass the time. Finding restaurants with Urban Spoon and the map applications come in handy as well. The last few times I travelled for business, I didn't use my laptop even once, but I used my iPad 3-4 hours daily.
It's also my eBook reader, and gets used in the living room when I need to quickly check something on the web. And, all of those Bluray disks I buy that have a digital copy can go onto it, so I can watch Avengers on an airplane or in a hotel room (on their TV if I bring the cable I have for that).
I wouldn't do my daily work on it, but a lot of things I do on a computer don't require that I be sitting at a desk and typing. For those things my tablet is fine, if not actually better (and probably would be true of any tablet).
When I go on vacation the only device I'll bring is my iPad -- because I can access all of my email accounts (including my corporate Outlook web stuff) and have ready access to the stuff that I need when I'm on vacation. If I can check my company email from the hammock in my mom's back yard, and then go back to reading my book (all without getting up), I call that a pretty useful thing.
Every time I see someone say "tablets don't have much use" I can only think that it should be qualified as "for you". I actually get quite a bit of use out of mine. Everybody I know with a tablet gets a fair bit of use out of it... just not to do the same tasks they'd be doing on their work computer.
Hell, a friend of a friend is a professional photographer. Last year after he and his team had covered an event, he logged into his system, and kicked off the first few steps of his photo processing workflow -- all from poolside with a beer in his hand. In 5 minutes, he had initiated the automated stuff, and could relax for the rest of the day.
You may not be able to think of uses for one, and that's fine. But for many of us, it does cover a lot of things.
This is just corporate bluster until such time as Microsoft can trot out sales figures proving that people are actually buying these.
As a general rule, when the CEO of a company says "our product is teh best and our competitors are teh sux0rs"... well, they're mostly talking out of their asses for their own purposes.
And, in the case of Steve Ballmer, he's got a long history of speaking drivel that he wants other people to believe, and being out of touch with what people actually want.
Since they have a hardwired generator, why not put the well pump on the generator? My parents have a 5KVA generator that has enough power to run the well pump as long as no other big loads are powered on
Much smaller generator than you're thinking of... small portable Honda which will run a couple of 120V outlets for a couple of hours at a time or so (possibly longer, never asked). But wired into the panel by a cousin of my mom's (industrial electrician so done right).
That, and the well pump is 100' away and pushes the water to the house, power is strung to it, and is a bit of a draw.
If I had a generator, I'd never use oil lamps
Again, same reason -- smallish generator, but enough to cover the absolute basics. And, really, lamp oil is cheap, and if you're rationing your emergency power, why waste it on batteries? He collects antiques, so he already had the hurricane lamps, which also have the benefit of throwing heat.
Use the generator just a little to run the furnace and run the fridge for a while, oil lamps for that homey feeling and some extra warmth. Last time they had to ride out a few days, I'm not sure they even really noticed except they didn't watch TV. They just hunkered in and hung out. My mother probably read just as much as she always does. Dad probably napped or did yard work.
I saw someone knock over an oil lamp once in a garage
Fair comment. But my folks have been using them for decades, and aren't exactly running around near open flame. That doesn't make it 100% safe, but they're not that dangerous if you're not mucking about with them.
The iPad mini is evidence that competition doesn't reliably drive prices down.
Not true, competition on the low end of tablets cause Apple to release a smaller iPad, thereby driving down the overall price of iPads by offering a cheaper model.
But on the low end, you have my wife's Playbook (which she gets routinely pissed off at and overall finds not as good as she'd hoped) and my brother's cheap-assed Android tablet (whose clock stops when the device is powered off).
I'm sure there's lots of better tablets than those examples, but it's a matter of perceived value. The proverbial Mr. Smith drinking beer and eating nuts will buy those in proportion to the value they assign. Or, so goes the theory.
So the people buying iPads feel they're getting some improved quality... I've got one. I quite like it. But I'm sure there's other lovely tablets out there too. But I can play the digital copies of movies I buy on my iPad without being sued for copyright infringement. And, it's convenient since I don't need to waste time trying to rip it (and, yes, of course you can do this on other tablets).
There is no "law of supply and demand". It's a fiction.
It's not a fiction, but it's not an immediate and absolute thing either. There's other things to consider.
There's only so many people really making the screens for touchscreen, and they're all suing one-another. Adding a new factory likely takes years and billions of dollars, and the suddenly huge market for them is still comparatively new in terms of being as widespread as they are now. Give it a few years, and there should be some downward pressure.
And, it's not unprecedented for companies to collude to keep prices artificially high -- it's not in their interest to have prices drop. OPEC does it all the time when they manage outputs -- it's done to maximize profits.
Then everything nowadays is encumbered by patents, and everybody wants to sue everybody into the ground. So trying to make it likely means vast legal resources just to figure out what to license from whom.
The problem with economics is often that people believe they can predict with 100% certainty what will happen, and being certain of their certainty, they try to manipulate things to their advantage -- high frequency trading in the stock market for example. That's designed to skim off the top as quickly as you can. Again, it's all about the profits.
It's not so much as it's a "fiction" in that there is some sound observations in it (which in general hold true) but a series of assumptions and observations get built up into a Model that can be used to make Predictions. Then it usually becomes a belief system, and that's where the fiction really begins (both Communism and Capitalism have their own fictions, it's not limited to just one).
Hell, in a sense, money is a fiction -- albeit it a very real aspect of our lives. But, I wouldn't disagree that the people who claim to understand how the economy works don't really know as much as they think.
It was out for over a week the last time we had a big ice storm.
An ice storm in Houston? Really?
Obviously, I believe you, because you live there and I don't... but as a Canadian, I guess I figured most of Texas would be too far south for stuff like that.
We had a big giant one back in '98, and it basically shut the entire city down for about a week. People were without power, and trapped on their streets because trees end electrical wires were down all over the place. In places, they literally had to call in the army to get people out of their homes and into shelters, and to clear some of the roads.
It's called a spring tide, and has to do with the geometry of things and gravity. So if you're already expecting a higher than usual tide, and combine that with storm surge, it will amplify it even more.
Or, do you just feel the need to continuously act like a crusty old bastard who thinks the world is populated with idiots?~
We all know the entire moon is still there (well most of us do), but the geometry of the gravity changes with position -- New Moon and Full Moon leading to the highest tides. So, maybe the expert actually knows more than you do.
Well, it's one of those things that if nothing happens, we all say the weather people were over-reacting.
But a bunch of years ago, in the aftermath of hurricane Juan, most of my family was without power for about a week or more. People had to spend an awful lot of time cutting down all of the felled trees just so they could get out of their streets. My parents lost the contents of two fridges and a freezer because there was no power to keep stuff cold.
My father now has a generator wired into the house, and set up so they can run the furnace, and a couple of outlets (run the fridge for a while to keep it cold), with enough gas to run it for most of a week. They already have a bunch of oil-lamps, and make sure to keep them fueled. They keep several gallons of water in the bathroom to flush with (they're on a well, no electricity means no water to flush the toilets, which is pretty nasty).
Extra water, and some extra provisions set aside just in case. An old Coleman camping grill they've had for years and a propane tank so they can still do some basic cooking. The barbeque as well.
It's easy to say "oh, nothing will happen, they're over-reacting", but anybody who has lived through the aftermath with no power, running water, heat... well, it's not all that difficult to keep a few things handy just in case it goes south. Sure, you may never actually need it... but once you've been burned once, you figure it's worth keeping it around just in case.
A few years after Juan, they did have a storm big enough to knock out power for a few days. Dad just fired up the generator, turned on the oil lamps, and just rode it out until everything was back to normal. It wasn't exactly the lap of luxury, but they could cover the essentials for a few days. He hasn't regretted the generator or any of the preparations since.
They still call every impending storm as if it's the coming apocalypse, but the few times it's been big enough to cause problems, they've been quite well prepared. If you've got heat, some basic lighting, and enough electricity to keep the fridge from spoiling, you can ride it out a whole lot easier.
In fact, the movie was thoroughly vetted by lawyers from Columbia Pictures, so I seriously doubt this would ever be the case in any substantive way.
Oh, I'm sure they vetted it to be sure that nothing could come back on them... but I suspect there's a lot of rainbows and kittens in there they let slide by which don't quite match up to reality .
Making sure they can't get sued for libel or defamation in no way ensures that it's entirely factual. I don't doubt that a few things got tarted up or made to look better without opening them up to liability. But I strongly suspect some of it paints Peckerburg in a much better light than reality would.
But don't lose sight of whose interests those lawyers were there to protect. It sure as hell isn't the truth in all cases.
They might also start companies and create jobs. True, wages may fall in the short-term, but having a larger educated and working population will help us in the long run.
Not really. Under the visa, they can only stay a few years.
In the long term, you're training foreign nationals to do your jobs, and then take that knowledge with them.
Competing with India for wages in the long term is a losing proposition... they have vastly more room to go up, than you do down.
I'm willing to bet of the 500,000 or so tech workers with H1B visas, there's almost as many of your own citizens in the same field who are out of work. This is just a cheap labor pool for corporations, and short term benefits.
My friend's 2 year old can pick up his BlackBerry Playbook, turn it on, find the application she wants, launch it, and play with it. No issues whatsoever.
She doesn't yet understand the concept of a phone call I don't think, but I should think at this rate she'll have a pretty good grasp of that before long.
I mostly just stand there shaking my head that she can navigate it so easy, since when we were kids we had absolutely nothing of the sort. Kids are just exposed to this a lot earlier now. Hell, I was a whole lot older than she when we got Pong for crying out loud.
I'm pretty sure the average 2-4 year old can do stuff that 10 years ago I couldn't have even explained the concept to my mother, let alone how to use it.
Well enough for the screen insert which shows the camera view to have a good outline of me and be able to show brightly colored blobs where my hands are.
Isn't waving your hands around how you make an iPad do what you want? Or is that different?
Well, when I gesture on my iPad, it does what I want... when I try to use some of the stuff in my Kinect, I find myself repeating myself or going back to the controller.
In some games, the Kinect interface is almost useless. I can't imagine trying to work with it, it's got a long way to go for that.
The latest Tiger Woods game is bordering on painful in places... move your hand right or left to do something, move right, nothing, move further right, nothing, move further right and then it swings wildly... repeat on the left to get back where you want.
If the same thing were true of my desktop interface, it would be switched off, packed away, and the mouse would be back in use in about 45 seconds.
Hey, for those of us who have been invited to a "meeting to discuss the agenda for the upcoming meeting" and other meta meetings... why not? Hell, I've been to a meeting to prepare a status update for the status update that was being prepared after a previous meeting. (Granted, that's usually the point where I start telling PMs they're wasting my time.)
And, like 'em or hate 'em, there will likely be several million of these things sold opening week, probably to the tune of a few hundred million dollars in sales... it's kind of hard to ignore it as irrelevant. Slashdot may hate them, but I'm hard pressed to think of any other products which everybody wants to know about when they're released.
No, it is more of a salesman failure, or a side effect of working in a large company.
People sell outsourcing services, and they use products that other divisions of the company make and support.
If something goes wrong, one division is on the hook for a high service level, and the other division provides the same level of crappy support they provide their customers.
The group on the hook for the service has no clout over the group that makes the product in use.
I have seen software sales where the salesman bundled a bunch of different products in order to check all of the boxes... With the end result being that the cost of the bundle was half (or less) than the un-bundled components would have been. But, the sales guy gets his bonus, and everyone else is l holding the bag to deliver on a money losing contract.
Not nearly enough companies fully understand what they have contracted to do, and ultimately can't.
Do you still think that putting your digital life in the "cloud", without any ability to fall back on a physical hard drive or device, is a good idea?
My first thoughts as well.
A friend was recently telling me about an issue they were having at work... they host stuff for other people, and have very high-availability SLAs. Unfortunately, the support they have from some of their own internal people is "weekdays 9-5". So when an outage happened, they were dead in the water, because their own people basically said "sorry, we don't do after hours support".
Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link. Granted, some of these sites may not have SLAs, but if you have an external vendor providing some of this stuff, and their service levels suck, then your service level can't be any better.
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
Well, these are the same Italian courts who decided there's enough evidence to support the idea that cell phones cause brain tumors despite the fact there's insufficient scientific evidence that's reliable enough to say that.
Which makes one wonder how much actual hard evidence they require, and how much they think about the effects of their rulings.
Unless the ruling is getting garbled as it passes through various sources, every scientist in Italy is going to have to start couching everything in such a way as to give themselves a wide latitude for interpretation.
There may or may not be an earthquake, it may or may not be catastrophic, it could happen any time between now and some other time -- when the ground starts shaking, you'll know. For now assume death is imminent, but don't panic.
Slashdot Mirror
Or because they want a product which isn't overly fiddly to use and which does what they want. For years, Microsoft over-promised, and under-delivered, which is why many of us started using Linux and other alternatives in the first place.
Since I was already using iTunes, it was a no-brainer for me. Everything was ready to go in about 5 minutes.
Define 'use'? I can do everything on a tablet that can be done on a smart phone (if you have a smart phone, you probably don't need a tablet -- for those of us who don't want/have smart phones, the tablet is a better choice due to screen size).
But when I travel, I get a lot of use out of my iPad -- movies on the plane, checking Gmail in the airport and hotel, Google voice calls to the wife, and video games to pass the time. Finding restaurants with Urban Spoon and the map applications come in handy as well. The last few times I travelled for business, I didn't use my laptop even once, but I used my iPad 3-4 hours daily.
It's also my eBook reader, and gets used in the living room when I need to quickly check something on the web. And, all of those Bluray disks I buy that have a digital copy can go onto it, so I can watch Avengers on an airplane or in a hotel room (on their TV if I bring the cable I have for that).
I wouldn't do my daily work on it, but a lot of things I do on a computer don't require that I be sitting at a desk and typing. For those things my tablet is fine, if not actually better (and probably would be true of any tablet).
When I go on vacation the only device I'll bring is my iPad -- because I can access all of my email accounts (including my corporate Outlook web stuff) and have ready access to the stuff that I need when I'm on vacation. If I can check my company email from the hammock in my mom's back yard, and then go back to reading my book (all without getting up), I call that a pretty useful thing.
Every time I see someone say "tablets don't have much use" I can only think that it should be qualified as "for you". I actually get quite a bit of use out of mine. Everybody I know with a tablet gets a fair bit of use out of it ... just not to do the same tasks they'd be doing on their work computer.
Hell, a friend of a friend is a professional photographer. Last year after he and his team had covered an event, he logged into his system, and kicked off the first few steps of his photo processing workflow -- all from poolside with a beer in his hand. In 5 minutes, he had initiated the automated stuff, and could relax for the rest of the day.
You may not be able to think of uses for one, and that's fine. But for many of us, it does cover a lot of things.
This is just corporate bluster until such time as Microsoft can trot out sales figures proving that people are actually buying these.
As a general rule, when the CEO of a company says "our product is teh best and our competitors are teh sux0rs" ... well, they're mostly talking out of their asses for their own purposes.
And, in the case of Steve Ballmer, he's got a long history of speaking drivel that he wants other people to believe, and being out of touch with what people actually want.
Much smaller generator than you're thinking of ... small portable Honda which will run a couple of 120V outlets for a couple of hours at a time or so (possibly longer, never asked). But wired into the panel by a cousin of my mom's (industrial electrician so done right).
That, and the well pump is 100' away and pushes the water to the house, power is strung to it, and is a bit of a draw.
Again, same reason -- smallish generator, but enough to cover the absolute basics. And, really, lamp oil is cheap, and if you're rationing your emergency power, why waste it on batteries? He collects antiques, so he already had the hurricane lamps, which also have the benefit of throwing heat.
Use the generator just a little to run the furnace and run the fridge for a while, oil lamps for that homey feeling and some extra warmth. Last time they had to ride out a few days, I'm not sure they even really noticed except they didn't watch TV. They just hunkered in and hung out. My mother probably read just as much as she always does. Dad probably napped or did yard work.
Fair comment. But my folks have been using them for decades, and aren't exactly running around near open flame. That doesn't make it 100% safe, but they're not that dangerous if you're not mucking about with them.
Not true, competition on the low end of tablets cause Apple to release a smaller iPad, thereby driving down the overall price of iPads by offering a cheaper model.
But on the low end, you have my wife's Playbook (which she gets routinely pissed off at and overall finds not as good as she'd hoped) and my brother's cheap-assed Android tablet (whose clock stops when the device is powered off).
I'm sure there's lots of better tablets than those examples, but it's a matter of perceived value. The proverbial Mr. Smith drinking beer and eating nuts will buy those in proportion to the value they assign. Or, so goes the theory.
So the people buying iPads feel they're getting some improved quality ... I've got one. I quite like it. But I'm sure there's other lovely tablets out there too. But I can play the digital copies of movies I buy on my iPad without being sued for copyright infringement. And, it's convenient since I don't need to waste time trying to rip it (and, yes, of course you can do this on other tablets).
It's not a fiction, but it's not an immediate and absolute thing either. There's other things to consider.
There's only so many people really making the screens for touchscreen, and they're all suing one-another. Adding a new factory likely takes years and billions of dollars, and the suddenly huge market for them is still comparatively new in terms of being as widespread as they are now. Give it a few years, and there should be some downward pressure.
And, it's not unprecedented for companies to collude to keep prices artificially high -- it's not in their interest to have prices drop. OPEC does it all the time when they manage outputs -- it's done to maximize profits.
Then everything nowadays is encumbered by patents, and everybody wants to sue everybody into the ground. So trying to make it likely means vast legal resources just to figure out what to license from whom.
The problem with economics is often that people believe they can predict with 100% certainty what will happen, and being certain of their certainty, they try to manipulate things to their advantage -- high frequency trading in the stock market for example. That's designed to skim off the top as quickly as you can. Again, it's all about the profits.
It's not so much as it's a "fiction" in that there is some sound observations in it (which in general hold true) but a series of assumptions and observations get built up into a Model that can be used to make Predictions. Then it usually becomes a belief system, and that's where the fiction really begins (both Communism and Capitalism have their own fictions, it's not limited to just one).
Hell, in a sense, money is a fiction -- albeit it a very real aspect of our lives. But, I wouldn't disagree that the people who claim to understand how the economy works don't really know as much as they think.
And that begats politics ... ;-)
So, you live somewhere where 1cm of snow will shut down the entire country then? ;-)
An ice storm in Houston? Really?
Obviously, I believe you, because you live there and I don't ... but as a Canadian, I guess I figured most of Texas would be too far south for stuff like that.
We had a big giant one back in '98, and it basically shut the entire city down for about a week. People were without power, and trapped on their streets because trees end electrical wires were down all over the place. In places, they literally had to call in the army to get people out of their homes and into shelters, and to clear some of the roads.
Are you at least aware of the fact that tides are higher during a full moon?
It's called a spring tide, and has to do with the geometry of things and gravity. So if you're already expecting a higher than usual tide, and combine that with storm surge, it will amplify it even more.
Or, do you just feel the need to continuously act like a crusty old bastard who thinks the world is populated with idiots?~
We all know the entire moon is still there (well most of us do), but the geometry of the gravity changes with position -- New Moon and Full Moon leading to the highest tides. So, maybe the expert actually knows more than you do.
Well, it's one of those things that if nothing happens, we all say the weather people were over-reacting.
But a bunch of years ago, in the aftermath of hurricane Juan, most of my family was without power for about a week or more. People had to spend an awful lot of time cutting down all of the felled trees just so they could get out of their streets. My parents lost the contents of two fridges and a freezer because there was no power to keep stuff cold.
My father now has a generator wired into the house, and set up so they can run the furnace, and a couple of outlets (run the fridge for a while to keep it cold), with enough gas to run it for most of a week. They already have a bunch of oil-lamps, and make sure to keep them fueled. They keep several gallons of water in the bathroom to flush with (they're on a well, no electricity means no water to flush the toilets, which is pretty nasty).
Extra water, and some extra provisions set aside just in case. An old Coleman camping grill they've had for years and a propane tank so they can still do some basic cooking. The barbeque as well.
It's easy to say "oh, nothing will happen, they're over-reacting", but anybody who has lived through the aftermath with no power, running water, heat ... well, it's not all that difficult to keep a few things handy just in case it goes south. Sure, you may never actually need it ... but once you've been burned once, you figure it's worth keeping it around just in case.
A few years after Juan, they did have a storm big enough to knock out power for a few days. Dad just fired up the generator, turned on the oil lamps, and just rode it out until everything was back to normal. It wasn't exactly the lap of luxury, but they could cover the essentials for a few days. He hasn't regretted the generator or any of the preparations since.
They still call every impending storm as if it's the coming apocalypse, but the few times it's been big enough to cause problems, they've been quite well prepared. If you've got heat, some basic lighting, and enough electricity to keep the fridge from spoiling, you can ride it out a whole lot easier.
Oh, I'm sure they vetted it to be sure that nothing could come back on them ... but I suspect there's a lot of rainbows and kittens in there they let slide by which don't quite match up to reality .
Making sure they can't get sued for libel or defamation in no way ensures that it's entirely factual. I don't doubt that a few things got tarted up or made to look better without opening them up to liability. But I strongly suspect some of it paints Peckerburg in a much better light than reality would.
But don't lose sight of whose interests those lawyers were there to protect. It sure as hell isn't the truth in all cases.
Not really. Under the visa, they can only stay a few years.
In the long term, you're training foreign nationals to do your jobs, and then take that knowledge with them.
Competing with India for wages in the long term is a losing proposition ... they have vastly more room to go up, than you do down.
I'm willing to bet of the 500,000 or so tech workers with H1B visas, there's almost as many of your own citizens in the same field who are out of work. This is just a cheap labor pool for corporations, and short term benefits.
There isn't a shortage of labor, there's a shortage of cheap labor.
Industry just wants to keep making massive amounts of money, but pay their staff less than the salaries the market created.
Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word.
We use "fungal" to describe "fungus-based", what is wrong with algal? One sees "algal bloom" fairly often.
Are we trying to dumb down science for the lowest common idiot now?
Just saying, the other dinosaurs are always all over stuff like that. ;-)
I think it would be an awesome t-shirt though, maybe the original authors would agree to using the images.
I think we need a in that sentence.
They're probably copyrighted, and you'd probably get sued.
But, yes, that would be an awesome T-shirt ... probably pretty popular among the paleontologists.
No shit guys. It's called Grappa, and the Italians have been doing it for centuries:
My wife says it tastes like jet fuel, but it's an acquired taste. :-P
Did someone think they've discovered something new?
My friend's 2 year old can pick up his BlackBerry Playbook, turn it on, find the application she wants, launch it, and play with it. No issues whatsoever.
She doesn't yet understand the concept of a phone call I don't think, but I should think at this rate she'll have a pretty good grasp of that before long.
I mostly just stand there shaking my head that she can navigate it so easy, since when we were kids we had absolutely nothing of the sort. Kids are just exposed to this a lot earlier now. Hell, I was a whole lot older than she when we got Pong for crying out loud.
I'm pretty sure the average 2-4 year old can do stuff that 10 years ago I couldn't have even explained the concept to my mother, let alone how to use it.
Well enough for the screen insert which shows the camera view to have a good outline of me and be able to show brightly colored blobs where my hands are.
It can definitely see me.
It's freaking parody or satire ... it's absolutely supposed to be protected use.
This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
You're lucky ... some days I might as well be speaking Gaelic to my XBox.
Well, when I gesture on my iPad, it does what I want ... when I try to use some of the stuff in my Kinect, I find myself repeating myself or going back to the controller.
In some games, the Kinect interface is almost useless. I can't imagine trying to work with it, it's got a long way to go for that.
The latest Tiger Woods game is bordering on painful in places ... move your hand right or left to do something, move right, nothing, move further right, nothing, move further right and then it swings wildly ... repeat on the left to get back where you want.
If the same thing were true of my desktop interface, it would be switched off, packed away, and the mouse would be back in use in about 45 seconds.
Hey, for those of us who have been invited to a "meeting to discuss the agenda for the upcoming meeting" and other meta meetings ... why not? Hell, I've been to a meeting to prepare a status update for the status update that was being prepared after a previous meeting. (Granted, that's usually the point where I start telling PMs they're wasting my time.)
And, like 'em or hate 'em, there will likely be several million of these things sold opening week, probably to the tune of a few hundred million dollars in sales ... it's kind of hard to ignore it as irrelevant. Slashdot may hate them, but I'm hard pressed to think of any other products which everybody wants to know about when they're released.
No, it is more of a salesman failure, or a side effect of working in a large company.
People sell outsourcing services, and they use products that other divisions of the company make and support.
If something goes wrong, one division is on the hook for a high service level, and the other division provides the same level of crappy support they provide their customers.
The group on the hook for the service has no clout over the group that makes the product in use.
I have seen software sales where the salesman bundled a bunch of different products in order to check all of the boxes ... With the end result being that the cost of the bundle was half (or less) than the un-bundled components would have been. But, the sales guy gets his bonus, and everyone else is l holding the bag to deliver on a money losing contract.
Not nearly enough companies fully understand what they have contracted to do, and ultimately can't.
My first thoughts as well.
A friend was recently telling me about an issue they were having at work ... they host stuff for other people, and have very high-availability SLAs. Unfortunately, the support they have from some of their own internal people is "weekdays 9-5". So when an outage happened, they were dead in the water, because their own people basically said "sorry, we don't do after hours support".
Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link. Granted, some of these sites may not have SLAs, but if you have an external vendor providing some of this stuff, and their service levels suck, then your service level can't be any better.
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
Well, these are the same Italian courts who decided there's enough evidence to support the idea that cell phones cause brain tumors despite the fact there's insufficient scientific evidence that's reliable enough to say that.
Which makes one wonder how much actual hard evidence they require, and how much they think about the effects of their rulings.
Unless the ruling is getting garbled as it passes through various sources, every scientist in Italy is going to have to start couching everything in such a way as to give themselves a wide latitude for interpretation.
There may or may not be an earthquake, it may or may not be catastrophic, it could happen any time between now and some other time -- when the ground starts shaking, you'll know. For now assume death is imminent, but don't panic.