Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?
That's not just leadership. That's what it takes to be a truly successful person. The humorist Will Rogers once said, "It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so." I'd take it step further and say that the real problem are the things we know but choose to ignore "just this once", over and over again. There's always some compelling reason to cut corners, but heeding those reasons leads to habitual corner cutting. On the other hand, you don't want to see a project fail because you're being too inflexible.
The most important thing you can bring to any project is not specific technical experience (e.g. 5 years experience in the framework the project uses); it's caring about the success of the project. *Sustainable* success is a very different thing than short-term success. If you want sustainable success as a project leader or program manager, you have to care about the people doing the work. Caring about the project *and* the people forces you to confront dilemmas and find solutions you wouldn't have considered otherwise. You've got to want to do the right thing so much that you're willing to struggle with what "doing the right thing" means.
I'm with you about the importance of problem definition. I'd call "management" the application of effective systematic practices in setting goals and directing resources (including people) to achieve those goals. I'd call "leadership" the values, attitudes and personal resources (especially relationships) that you bring to handling challenges that are unpredictable and difficult to address systematically as they unfold in real time [note 1]. What you care about and how much you care about it is an important aspect of leadership. For example, I recognize the value of the occasional marathon hacking session, but I don't permit it to become the normal mode of operation on teams I manage because I think it's bad for the coders and generates poor results in the long term. In that case my values aren't in conflict. But occasionally things have happened that are outside my control that forced me to drive my team harder than is sustainable. In that case my values are in conflict. That requires both serious thought as the situation unfolds and reflection on what happened after the fact.
As to whether leaders are "born" or "made", it's the wrong question altogether. As a leader the experience and values you bring to a situation are important assets. Some of these you bring with you from before you join an organization, and in that sense they look like attributes you were "born" with. But others you can cultivate through training and experience in an organization, which appear "made". And the relationship between management and leadership is a dynamic one. As a leader your values should drive you to become a better manager and as a manager you should see the value of cultivating leadership assets.
I think engineers are very well prepared by training and professional inclination to learn the art of management, but often have difficulty adjusting to dealing with fuzzy, irrational and unpredictable factors that require leadership assets. They are so strong in applying systematic and quantifiable measures to problems they tend to not overlook things that are outside the formal scope of a project definition or formal organization structure. For example, two members of a team having an interpersonal conflict is something an inexperienced manager with an engineering background might not be well prepared for. The team members *should* work it out, but saying that should happen doesn't mean it will. Likewise, an engineer new to management might not realize the importance of building personal networks within the company. He might be inclined to rely upon his ability to develop rigorous analyses of a problem t
The Xoom compares to only one iPad2 model, a 3G unit with a decent amount of storage - and even then it's around $70 more.
Not once you add the price for the accessories you'll need for the iPad 2 (e.g. funky proprietary connector to HDMI, etc.) When you're done you're within spitting distance. The price difference between the devices reflects what the manufacturers have decided to include.
I don't think it's correct to say that because one particular model is close at all price-wise, that the two units are close in price.
I disagree. If two models with similar specs cost about the same, they're close in price. If one manufacturer offers a different model at a different price point, you can't really compare the value of that device to a differently capable device without bringing in the utility of, say, another 16GB of space. That differs from user to user so we can't generalize about value from *our* preferences.
You have to consider the entry price to get into the platform,
That I agree on, but Xoom to 32GB iPad 2 is the closest thing to a fruit variety to same fruit variety comparison as we'll get. If you start talking about different configurations then you really ought to consider that you can buy cheaper Android tablets that cut other corners besides storage. Maybe you could get by with a 7" screen or a 10.1 inch screen with lower resolution, for example. These are all valid points to raise, but they're *different* points.
What I'm addressing is the ability of competitors to produce a price-competitive tablet. Clearly they can. For various reasons they have not chosen to occupy all the same price segments as Apple, just as Apple has not chosen to address the sub $300 price point that Archos has with the Archos 70. It's not fair to compare the price of the iPad 2 to the Archos 70 because you get so much more with the iPad 2. For the same reason you can't compare the iPad 2 16GB to the Xoom with 32GB. The 16GB model gives Apple a lower entry point, which is a good thing for Apple customers, but that's a *different* issue, and if you're going to make that you've got to admit that Apple could have given its customers an even *lower* entry point, as I expect they will probably do after they've saturated the $500 and up market segment.
So the conclusion is the various prices offered by different vendors don't reflect a dramatic difference in technological capability, but different business strategies. Apple's strategy may well be the best strategy; we can be fairly certain it'll prove far from the worst. But it seems probable that Motorola or Samsung could match Apple in entry level price and specs if they chose to. *Design* of course is a different matter altogether, but it's another intangible whose perceived value varies from user to user. If you said that Apple's competitors should pay more attention to design, I wouldn't disagree with you.
Well, for one thing it's hard to build a system that is very thin, combines a great screen, reasonable performance and long battery life, and to make that all really *cheap*. There are lots and lots of Android tablets at half the price of the iPad, and not surprisingly they all sacrifice one thing or another (typically screen size or quality, performance, or in the case of the B&N Nook support costs are trimmed by limiting functionality).
Apple is using the same (or equivalent) suppliers as anyone else, and they're pretty much guaranteed strong sales, so right there they have a price advantage since they can amortize fixed costs over a large number of units. So I don't think we'll see any manufacturers offering dramatically *better* value than Apple at the iPad price point. That said, the Motorola Xoom is reasonably comparable to the iPad 2, and costs about the same as the iPad 2 model with the same amount of memory after you've shelled out for the accessories (like HDMI output for the iPad) to make them functionally equivalent. Samsung's Galaxy Pad seems to be in the same ballpark hardware-wise, but Samsung has caught some criticism for charging a little more than Apple, especially as Apple has done an especially nice job on the iPad design. Unless a tablet blows the iPad out of the water (not very likely), costing a bit more than the iPad is probably a mistake. You might convince people that something like the Galaxy Tab is just as good as the iPad2, but convincing them its *better*, even $25 better, is much tougher, as by now people know the iPad is very good indeed.
At present the Android software is less mature than iOS, which has been on the market for four years to Android's three. Until recently Android on tablets has had UIs hacked together with varying success by manufacturers, whereas iOS has been customized for tablet operation for almost a year; the first Honeycomb tablet came out last month.
So the state of the market is that the iPad has competitors with comparable (although not identical) hardware at comparable cost, but at present enjoys an advantage in user base running tablet specific software and a net edge in the current maturity of that software. Android is available on devices in the iPad price range all the way down to the $100 level, 1/5 the iPad entry price, with the bulk of the device selling for 50% to 80% of the iPad entry price. That all the devices in the lower price segment are much less refined than the IPad should hardly be a surprise. Many of these devices are feeble, "me too" responses to the iPad, but there are some good values to be had in the sub $300 and under price range for Android tablets.
Before the Wikipedia brouhaha, Old Man Murray probably didn't meet Wikipedia's notability standards, which require citable external sources of information on a topic. Then the act of deleting the article caused such sources to spring into existence, thus making Old Man Murray notable if one follows the guidelines literally.
The reasonable intent of the citation rule is that a thing should not be considered just notable because some Wikipedia contributors *claim* it is. Yet, somehow, this reasonable rule doesn't seem to cover the possibility that a topic becomes notable because some Wikipedia contributors claim it is *not*.
There is really no rational purpose to putting spin, one way or another, on this situation. We should stick to the facts, which are at present that we have a very serious situation, one which while having some unexpected wrinkles (as real world situations always do) does not appear at present to be likely to cause loss of life, further injuries, or irreparable environmental harm.
That said, we're not out of the woods yet. The time to draw lessons from this event is after things are fully under control and a proper investigation has been conducted.
I don't understand this urge to rush to bolt a developing situation onto some preconceived narrative. A situational assessment... sure. Drawing some kind of moral conclusion? No. What's the point? In part this the 24 hour new cycle. When somebody connected with an organization (not just the government) says something controversial, people who have no direct knowledge of the situation are demanding dismissals less than twelve hours later, as if it is more important to have a quick response than an informed one. Sure, quick is good all things being equal, but hasty opinions are seldom equal to carefully considered ones. I say let the dust settle so we can see the facts, and let each side present its case.
I agree that replacing antiquated designs with safer modern designs is a good idea. I knew that before the Fukushima incident, and even the worst possible (although unlikely) outcome would not necessarily change the basis for that opinion. Lessons learned from the Fukushima incident *might* change my opinion, but that would be contingent on facts that aren't available yet. It's premature at the very least to blame anti-nuclear activists for the death of nuclear power.
So I say, put away the crystal ball, tone down the rhetoric, keep fingers of blame unpointed for the time being. Let the public and private officials deal with this, but watch them closely and hold them accountable later. And don't plant your opinion flag too early, because it's psychologically hard to abandon a position you've adopted strongly, even when it is rational to do so. When the dust has settled is the time to have the big political fight.
(1) Reporting is arguably a special case that wasn't taken into account in the TOS. Maybe a reporter posting a photo given to him by a source isn't posting his "own work", but it's really a different case than if he took somebody else's photo and posted it without permission.
(2) Just because a company's TOS says you can't do "X", doesn't mean it is *obligated* to take action against "X" where there is reasonable justification for a user doing "X".
(3) A service has a right to protect itself from legal problems that result from a user's actions, even if those actions are reasonable. That is not an excuse for being morally craven, but then moral cowardice isn't a crime.
So, I'd say that Flicker was within its rights to take these photos down, and we are within our rights to look upon them with contempt for doing so.
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away...
I don't think that's a reasonable characterization. What we have here is an unproductive stalemate, where the anti-nuclear movement has succeeded in making nuclear power generation politically unpopular, but their preferred solution (increased energy efficiency) is even more unpopular, and decades of cheap petroleum since the 1980s has made breaking the stalemate not worth anyone's while.
What's going to happen is that oil prices will continue to rise, but in a chaotic fashion, and with practical plug-in hybrids coming on the market every time we have a spike they'll become more popular, even though the spike (as in the current one) is meaningless in the long term. The result is that a significant number new nuclear power plants are an inevitability starting some time in the next decade.
That's just political realism.
As I point out elsewhere, conflict can be a good thing for creativity. The interesting new reactor designs are a result of addressing the more reasonable concerns of anti-nuclear activists. That's a good thing, although it has led to some bad feelings. All the legitimate concerns of the anti-nuclear movement haven't been fully addressed, but I think enough progress has been made to start building new plants on these designs.
I favor a measured approach in developing new nuclear technology. If we went on a crash problem to solve our energy problems (as some suggested in 2008), we'd be getting lots of new reactors with this same proven but obsolete design. In a couple decades we'd have a huge number of technological white elephants on our hands. What we should do is invest in building a small number of plants using two different approaches, so as to gain experience with them. That won't exacerbate the as yet unsolved problems of nuclear power unduly (e.g. waste disposal), and if one of the approaches is a bust it's not the end of the world. As we prepare to commit more to nuclear power, we can improve the grid, which will also incent an increase in sustainable sources such as wind and new technologies such as solar thermal.
What I'd like to see is greater dependency on electricity and greater diversity in the electricity supply, spreading the environmental impact and economic risks over multiple energy sources, and fostering competition over greater geographical areas.
Well, the core itself was designed by GE, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Not only is there the rest of the plant to consider, there's the process of procurement and the actual day to day operation to take into account. Reading the anthropological tea leaves to predict the success of a project is a dubious practice. There's no reason to believe that Japan has some kind of net cultural advantage over the US in avoiding this kind of nuclear accident.
True, Japan's formidable worth ethic and team cohesion are huge pluses, but that cohesion can be a double-edged sword when problems leading to shame and failure for the organization are concerned. Just as we might look on their team cohesion with some envy, they might look at American cultural tolerance for open conflict with some envy. Conflict can be a powerful creative force and empower a team to confront problems rather than kicking them down the road. Or it can lead to pointless bickering and a sullen sense of individual entitlement at the expense of the team. In America (or parts of it) having a public conflict with a superior doesn't spell a breakdown in the relationship or a lack of respect, just as in Japan giving an employee an open order doesn't imply a lack of respect.
Having led a multicultural engineering team, I'd say the capacity of the team isn't limited by the culture of its members, but by leadership understanding of how to work with that culture's style. I initially mishandled the team, because I didn't understand that people from some parts of the world aren't comfortable getting up in a public meeting and disagreeing with the boss. So I'd do stupid things like get up in a meeting and ask "What do you think of this plan? Do you think you could get this done in eight weeks?" when the person I was asking would never tell me to my face my plan was bad, and that it was totally unreasonable to ask for it in anything less than five months. If I wanted that information a beer after work and an oblique approach would have got the job done. And that's what engineering is: getting the job done with the materials available to you.
So we shouldn't be surprised when any culture produces either an engineering triumph or an engineering disaster. Engineering is hard and complicated, so I suspect that any tendency to cultural advantage or disadvantage in some scenario is neutralized by its opposite in another. And people don't come out of the cultural nurture factory perfectly uniform. Engineering talent is a rare gift, and that alone is enough to make someone atypical in any culture.
There's no place for cultural determinism in engineering. Would I want BP running a nuke in my neighborhood? No. But I wouldn't tar all of British engineering with that brush. Germany is famous for engineering fetishes, but in WW2 Hermann Göring publicly admitted to being "green with envy" over the engineering of the British de Havilland aircraft.
That's not possible. Market forces prevent unsafe designs from being built. Who would invest in a nuclear reactor that could melt down before its rated service life? Or in an automobile that put its occupants at unusual risk of death or injuries?
People would have to be really stupid to invest in such disasters waiting to happen...
Your reasoning is impeccable, but I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
What's interesting here is how differently China plays this game. They're focused on long-term national prestige and influence, so they can tolerate being a few years behind by specifying the use of domestic products. That ensures the cash flow their enterprises need to catch up. That would. be unthinkable in the US, with the. exception of a few companies like Boeing, and. even then it's ideologically incorrect to be up front. about helping the chosen enterprise. The standard position is that the competitor kettle is blackened by government favoritism.
A lot of people are pointing out that there isn't much energy in a single "shot" from this machine, which is true, and some of those people are then drawing analogies based on the same total energy applied over a long time, which is bogus. You can't draw a nice rectangular hyperbola of time and power and say every point on that hyperbola is equivalent with respect to outcome because the energy is the same. There are time related phenomena which limit the destructive effect of low power, long duration events.
Take the razor blade. The total energy used spread over the entire mass of stainless steel isn't going to change that razor blade one bit, but the speed of heat conduction in steel is finite. If you concentrate the same amount of energy in the same tiny area, there will be more localized heating if it's 0.1J delivered in 100ns as opposed to the same amount of energy delivered in 100 days. Furthermore, this localized heating could cause secondary reactions, such as the iron burning.
Imagine you take a matchstick and put it on a hot plate set to 100 F (38 C) for a week. The same amount of energy pumped into the matchstick in one second will have a much more impressive effect as the match flares and lights.
Well, I think this is a situation where going straight for the dichotomy (either it's "okay" or "it's a crime worthy of the strongest punishment in our power to impose") maybe isn't such a great idea.
We should recognize the terrible potential such accusations have to disrupt an innocent teacher's life, while at the same time recognizing that children at the age of 12 or 13 bear less culpability for their actions than an adult would. The brains of children this age are less capable of impulse control than an adult brain; and children this age don't have an adult understanding of the consequences of their actions in any case.
The knee jerk urge to go for the maximal punishment available mirrors, in an ironic way, the childish impatience with restraint and reflection. I would suspend the kids, then make them get up in front of a school assembly -- or better yet an assembly of parents and students -- and issue a public apology and retraction. Then I'd set them to a rigorous program of lugubrious public service by way of restitution. That would be a better solution, leaving all involved better off.
I think officially you should call it: a Java-like language ?
I don't think so. Android programs are compiled with the standard JDK compiler then the resultant bytecode is cross compiled for Dalvik rather than the standard Java Virtual Machine, so clearly they are written in the Java language. I think you might mean that programs are written in a "Java-like execution environment", although that's a bit of a stretch; you could just as well say that dotNet's CLR is a "Java-like environment". In some ways that's *more* true than calling Dalvik "Java-like".
Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.
These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural third world classroom built in his honor ($125)? Maybe instead of that iPad for that special someone, you could pay for the education of five girls at $100 apiece; provide a dozen vaccinations to children at $45; or teach ten women to read at $50 apiece. You can reintegrate eight child soldiers to their community through education and apprenticeship programs for only $58 each.
I am amazed at the cynicism of some people. You make it sound like philanthropy is something working class people would never do. Well, *I'm* working class and *I've* done it. The power of the almighty dollar isn't just for the rich. You can do amazing things for so little. You can change somebody's life for what amounts to pocket change you'd never miss.
Sure, but you're talking about the limits of the speed of information transport. That's not the same thing as *timing*.
Suppose there were an absolute limit of 82 mph on how fast a baseball could mover. That means the fastest possible pitch would travel from the mound to home base in about 500ms. Suppose there was a pitcher who could consistently throw at 82mph, and you bet that you could beat any pitch he threw to home plate. You wouldn't wait to see the ball hit the catcher's glove before throwing your ball -- the best you could do is trail him by half a second. You'd watch for him to start throwing, and fire off your throw before the ball had even left his hand. Your pitch could arrive at the plate 400ms after his left his hand without violating the 82 mph physical limitation on ball speed because it would start *after* he had committed himself to throw, but *before* he had managed to release the ball.
Now in this game, getting to the plate 400ms after he releases his throw means you beat the pitcher. Next suppose there's a million dollar prize for the first ball to cross the plate after the pitcher releases his pitch. Somebody manages to shave a little more time off his wind-up and gets there in only 300ms after the pitcher releases his ball. So while everyone's ball takes 500ms to travel to the plate, there's a difference in 200ms between the first and last ball to arrive. So you work on quickly triggering your throw as soon as the pitcher starts to move, and eventually you manage to shave the time down to 50ms. A naive analysis would suggest you'd have to throw at 800mph to do that, but the real trick is that you can get your ball released faster. The advantage of shaving the time so much is that nobody is likely to be able to beat you to the plate without risking some spurious throws.
...but how do you draw an arbitrary line that's fair and agreeable to all? I don't believe that's possible, hence you can never draw a line at all.
Of course, if you insist on the line being "fair" AND "agreeable to all", because some people will never agree to any fair drawing of the line. There are probably a wide variety of ways to draw the line that would be fair.
Well, let's grant that inertia is useful. Why not set up non-profit hide speed trader that puts its profits back into the market, and ban anyone else from sub-second trading? Wouldn't that deliver all the benefits these guys supposedly do at a fraction of the cost? Wouldn't that be more fair to organizations that generate a lot of trades, since they'd benefit from this mechanism almost as often as they'd lose?
Depends on what you compare it it. A 100mm (roughly 4 inch) wafer of pure silicon could cost as much as $500 in single quantities for certain grades. That's certainly far more expensive than raw silk, although one must consider the cost of preparing the raw silk to be suitable for use in electronics.That's bound to be expensive in small quantities, but reduce itself greatly as the scale of the process increases.
Most likely this was a six degrees of separation style investigation, like the Muslims who were suspected of being terrorists because they frequently called the same telephone number that certain suspected terrorists also called. The number was a pizza delivery service.
Afifi's late father was the president of the Muslim Community Association in San Francisco. He moved back to Egypt in 2003, where he died in 2008. So it isn't hard to put this together. Afifi's as a businessman and community leader probably had a huge personal network. He was put on the watch list because he probably had two degrees of separation from a suspected terrorist, which made *him* a suspected terrorist. That means that the younger Afifi had *one* degree of separation from a suspected terrorist. When the elder Afifi moved back to Egypt, the younger Afifi went to visit him there. After that he was a person with one degree of separation from a suspected terrorist who had also traveled to the Middle East, and therefore a suspected terrorist as well. If the mechanic who spotted the GPS happened to be Muslim, *he's* probably a suspected terrorist now too, and if he has any customers who are Muslims they'd better not travel to the Middle East.
One term for such a steaming pile of investigatory turds would be "grasping at straws." If you think the FBI could not possibly be so screwed up, consider the case of the scholar who was hired to lecture at the FBI on his field of study: Islamic extremism. Afterward he was put on the watch list because surveillance of international calls showed he had called people with ties to Islamic extremists.
The problem with paranoia is that if *somebody* is out to get you, you won't be able to tell them from the countless people you *think* are out to get you, but are not.
According the Wikipedia policies, the existence of reliable third party sources on the topic is what make a topic notable. For example, if somebody wanted to create an entry on me, my facebook page would not be evidence of my notability. However, if I had been profiled in a newspaper article or TV show, that would be evidence of notability. Furthermore, I would remain notable even after those source were no longer available on-line.
From what I can see "notability" seems to be logically related to the "no original research" criterion. An article on a "non-notable" subject necessarily consists entirely of original research rather than citable sources. Conversely, if enough reliably sourced information exists to construct an article on a subject then apparently by the Wikipedia definition that subject should be considered notable (even if it's a bit silly).
On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable policy. Whether the policy is enforced uniformly and fairly in every case is a different matter. Something like a review site is a murky case. It might be referenced by its participants on their personal blogs, but that doesn't make it notable. There are some "fifteen minutes of fame" conditions that would make the site notable, but short of that precisely where such a site would cross over from non-notable to notable can't be clearly defined.
Ironically, a front page Slashdot article about Old Man Murray's non-notability might well make Old Man Murray notable.
The problem is that the "layman's vernacular" doesn't necessarily correspond to the charge. "Aiding the enemy" doesn't mean doing *anything* the enemy can gain benefit from; if it did then *all* infractions could be construed as "aiding the enemy" in some way. Returning late from leave could be a capital crime if we adopted such a broad interpretation of "aiding the enemy". We should not be so cavalier about throwing terms around like "treason" or "aiding the enemy".
I think a case can be made either way here under the Uniform Code. Article 104 defines "aiding the enemy" to include "without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to, or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly..."
So it seems the necessary elements of the crime in this case are:
(a) knowingly (b) providing intelligence (c) to the enemy, albeit indirectly.
So a charge of "aiding the enemy" is reasonable in this case, unless it is clear that the defense will be able to successfully refute any of these elements. It isn't hard to come up with some hypothetical defenses.
Suppose for a moment that the defense could show that Manning's intent was to release information about what he believed to be illegal activities undertaken by the military. While public knowledge of these infractions might benefit the enemy, it is not *intelligence* for the purposes of this law; it is something that *should* be made public to Americans to ensure proper civilian control of the military. His oath to defend the Constitution would arguably require him to make that information public.
Now let us further stipulate under this scenario that Manning's beliefs were patently unreasonable -- that any reasonable person would not believe releasing the information concerned had any connection with defending the Constitution. Such a reasonable person would know that collecting and forwarding the information would be "aiding the enemy" as defined under article 104. Private Manning, however, is *not* a reasonable person, and did not (under this scenario) *knowingly* aid the enemy. Being that unreasonable might well be a crime. Manning might be so despicably uninformed that it amounts to serious breach of duty punishable under the law. But even thought that would be *a* crime it would not be *the* crime defined by article 104.
This is purely hypothetical. We don't know that arguments either side will present and how well those arguments will be presented. We don't know the extenuating or damning circumstances that may come to light in a trial, so at this stage it is possible to reasonably entertain either opinion: that Maning is, or is not guilty of "aiding the enemy" as defined in the law establishing that offense.
Blaming China or low quality is misplacing the blame in any case. The low quality of so many Chinese-made goods isn't because China is unable to make good quality; it's because Americans are addicted to buying shiny cheap junk and the Chinese give us what the retailers ask for. The market segment that is willing to pay more for quality is quite small in America.
That said, Apple *does* target the quality minded consumer with its computers. Normally the design and build quality on Apple stuff I've seen is first rate; this example comes from a sample size of one. Even a top notch manufacturer can have a bad unit. Except for the unclosed ZIF socket the problems listed don't seem to be the kind that are easy to spot in inspection. Probably the worst issue was the excessive thermal paste, and that's under the heatsink.
Does this one unit mean that build quality is slipping at Apple suppliers? Possibly, but not necessarily. The negative publicity about Foxconn could mean Apple has more on its plate than quality these days when dealing with its suppliers, but that's pure speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?
That's not just leadership. That's what it takes to be a truly successful person. The humorist Will Rogers once said, "It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so." I'd take it step further and say that the real problem are the things we know but choose to ignore "just this once", over and over again. There's always some compelling reason to cut corners, but heeding those reasons leads to habitual corner cutting. On the other hand, you don't want to see a project fail because you're being too inflexible.
The most important thing you can bring to any project is not specific technical experience (e.g. 5 years experience in the framework the project uses); it's caring about the success of the project. *Sustainable* success is a very different thing than short-term success. If you want sustainable success as a project leader or program manager, you have to care about the people doing the work. Caring about the project *and* the people forces you to confront dilemmas and find solutions you wouldn't have considered otherwise. You've got to want to do the right thing so much that you're willing to struggle with what "doing the right thing" means.
I'm with you about the importance of problem definition. I'd call "management" the application of effective systematic practices in setting goals and directing resources (including people) to achieve those goals. I'd call "leadership" the values, attitudes and personal resources (especially relationships) that you bring to handling challenges that are unpredictable and difficult to address systematically as they unfold in real time [note 1]. What you care about and how much you care about it is an important aspect of leadership. For example, I recognize the value of the occasional marathon hacking session, but I don't permit it to become the normal mode of operation on teams I manage because I think it's bad for the coders and generates poor results in the long term. In that case my values aren't in conflict. But occasionally things have happened that are outside my control that forced me to drive my team harder than is sustainable. In that case my values are in conflict. That requires both serious thought as the situation unfolds and reflection on what happened after the fact.
As to whether leaders are "born" or "made", it's the wrong question altogether. As a leader the experience and values you bring to a situation are important assets. Some of these you bring with you from before you join an organization, and in that sense they look like attributes you were "born" with. But others you can cultivate through training and experience in an organization, which appear "made". And the relationship between management and leadership is a dynamic one. As a leader your values should drive you to become a better manager and as a manager you should see the value of cultivating leadership assets.
I think engineers are very well prepared by training and professional inclination to learn the art of management, but often have difficulty adjusting to dealing with fuzzy, irrational and unpredictable factors that require leadership assets. They are so strong in applying systematic and quantifiable measures to problems they tend to not overlook things that are outside the formal scope of a project definition or formal organization structure. For example, two members of a team having an interpersonal conflict is something an inexperienced manager with an engineering background might not be well prepared for. The team members *should* work it out, but saying that should happen doesn't mean it will. Likewise, an engineer new to management might not realize the importance of building personal networks within the company. He might be inclined to rely upon his ability to develop rigorous analyses of a problem t
The Xoom compares to only one iPad2 model, a 3G unit with a decent amount of storage - and even then it's around $70 more.
Not once you add the price for the accessories you'll need for the iPad 2 (e.g. funky proprietary connector to HDMI, etc.) When you're done you're within spitting distance. The price difference between the devices reflects what the manufacturers have decided to include.
I don't think it's correct to say that because one particular model is close at all price-wise, that the two units are close in price.
I disagree. If two models with similar specs cost about the same, they're close in price. If one manufacturer offers a different model at a different price point, you can't really compare the value of that device to a differently capable device without bringing in the utility of, say, another 16GB of space. That differs from user to user so we can't generalize about value from *our* preferences.
You have to consider the entry price to get into the platform,
That I agree on, but Xoom to 32GB iPad 2 is the closest thing to a fruit variety to same fruit variety comparison as we'll get. If you start talking about different configurations then you really ought to consider that you can buy cheaper Android tablets that cut other corners besides storage. Maybe you could get by with a 7" screen or a 10.1 inch screen with lower resolution, for example. These are all valid points to raise, but they're *different* points.
What I'm addressing is the ability of competitors to produce a price-competitive tablet. Clearly they can. For various reasons they have not chosen to occupy all the same price segments as Apple, just as Apple has not chosen to address the sub $300 price point that Archos has with the Archos 70. It's not fair to compare the price of the iPad 2 to the Archos 70 because you get so much more with the iPad 2. For the same reason you can't compare the iPad 2 16GB to the Xoom with 32GB. The 16GB model gives Apple a lower entry point, which is a good thing for Apple customers, but that's a *different* issue, and if you're going to make that you've got to admit that Apple could have given its customers an even *lower* entry point, as I expect they will probably do after they've saturated the $500 and up market segment.
So the conclusion is the various prices offered by different vendors don't reflect a dramatic difference in technological capability, but different business strategies. Apple's strategy may well be the best strategy; we can be fairly certain it'll prove far from the worst. But it seems probable that Motorola or Samsung could match Apple in entry level price and specs if they chose to. *Design* of course is a different matter altogether, but it's another intangible whose perceived value varies from user to user. If you said that Apple's competitors should pay more attention to design, I wouldn't disagree with you.
Well, for one thing it's hard to build a system that is very thin, combines a great screen, reasonable performance and long battery life, and to make that all really *cheap*. There are lots and lots of Android tablets at half the price of the iPad, and not surprisingly they all sacrifice one thing or another (typically screen size or quality, performance, or in the case of the B&N Nook support costs are trimmed by limiting functionality).
Apple is using the same (or equivalent) suppliers as anyone else, and they're pretty much guaranteed strong sales, so right there they have a price advantage since they can amortize fixed costs over a large number of units. So I don't think we'll see any manufacturers offering dramatically *better* value than Apple at the iPad price point. That said, the Motorola Xoom is reasonably comparable to the iPad 2, and costs about the same as the iPad 2 model with the same amount of memory after you've shelled out for the accessories (like HDMI output for the iPad) to make them functionally equivalent. Samsung's Galaxy Pad seems to be in the same ballpark hardware-wise, but Samsung has caught some criticism for charging a little more than Apple, especially as Apple has done an especially nice job on the iPad design. Unless a tablet blows the iPad out of the water (not very likely), costing a bit more than the iPad is probably a mistake. You might convince people that something like the Galaxy Tab is just as good as the iPad2, but convincing them its *better*, even $25 better, is much tougher, as by now people know the iPad is very good indeed.
At present the Android software is less mature than iOS, which has been on the market for four years to Android's three. Until recently Android on tablets has had UIs hacked together with varying success by manufacturers, whereas iOS has been customized for tablet operation for almost a year; the first Honeycomb tablet came out last month.
So the state of the market is that the iPad has competitors with comparable (although not identical) hardware at comparable cost, but at present enjoys an advantage in user base running tablet specific software and a net edge in the current maturity of that software. Android is available on devices in the iPad price range all the way down to the $100 level, 1/5 the iPad entry price, with the bulk of the device selling for 50% to 80% of the iPad entry price. That all the devices in the lower price segment are much less refined than the IPad should hardly be a surprise. Many of these devices are feeble, "me too" responses to the iPad, but there are some good values to be had in the sub $300 and under price range for Android tablets.
as a connoisseur of fine irony.
Before the Wikipedia brouhaha, Old Man Murray probably didn't meet Wikipedia's notability standards, which require citable external sources of information on a topic. Then the act of deleting the article caused such sources to spring into existence, thus making Old Man Murray notable if one follows the guidelines literally.
The reasonable intent of the citation rule is that a thing should not be considered just notable because some Wikipedia contributors *claim* it is. Yet, somehow, this reasonable rule doesn't seem to cover the possibility that a topic becomes notable because some Wikipedia contributors claim it is *not*.
There is really no rational purpose to putting spin, one way or another, on this situation. We should stick to the facts, which are at present that we have a very serious situation, one which while having some unexpected wrinkles (as real world situations always do) does not appear at present to be likely to cause loss of life, further injuries, or irreparable environmental harm.
That said, we're not out of the woods yet. The time to draw lessons from this event is after things are fully under control and a proper investigation has been conducted.
I don't understand this urge to rush to bolt a developing situation onto some preconceived narrative. A situational assessment ... sure. Drawing some kind of moral conclusion? No. What's the point? In part this the 24 hour new cycle. When somebody connected with an organization (not just the government) says something controversial, people who have no direct knowledge of the situation are demanding dismissals less than twelve hours later, as if it is more important to have a quick response than an informed one. Sure, quick is good all things being equal, but hasty opinions are seldom equal to carefully considered ones. I say let the dust settle so we can see the facts, and let each side present its case.
I agree that replacing antiquated designs with safer modern designs is a good idea. I knew that before the Fukushima incident, and even the worst possible (although unlikely) outcome would not necessarily change the basis for that opinion. Lessons learned from the Fukushima incident *might* change my opinion, but that would be contingent on facts that aren't available yet. It's premature at the very least to blame anti-nuclear activists for the death of nuclear power.
So I say, put away the crystal ball, tone down the rhetoric, keep fingers of blame unpointed for the time being. Let the public and private officials deal with this, but watch them closely and hold them accountable later. And don't plant your opinion flag too early, because it's psychologically hard to abandon a position you've adopted strongly, even when it is rational to do so. When the dust has settled is the time to have the big political fight.
(1) Reporting is arguably a special case that wasn't taken into account in the TOS. Maybe a reporter posting a photo given to him by a source isn't posting his "own work", but it's really a different case than if he took somebody else's photo and posted it without permission.
(2) Just because a company's TOS says you can't do "X", doesn't mean it is *obligated* to take action against "X" where there is reasonable justification for a user doing "X".
(3) A service has a right to protect itself from legal problems that result from a user's actions, even if those actions are reasonable. That is not an excuse for being morally craven, but then moral cowardice isn't a crime.
So, I'd say that Flicker was within its rights to take these photos down, and we are within our rights to look upon them with contempt for doing so.
Shatner?
No, but close: posting from a mobile phone.
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away...
I don't think that's a reasonable characterization. What we have here is an unproductive stalemate, where the anti-nuclear movement has succeeded in making nuclear power generation politically unpopular, but their preferred solution (increased energy efficiency) is even more unpopular, and decades of cheap petroleum since the 1980s has made breaking the stalemate not worth anyone's while.
What's going to happen is that oil prices will continue to rise, but in a chaotic fashion, and with practical plug-in hybrids coming on the market every time we have a spike they'll become more popular, even though the spike (as in the current one) is meaningless in the long term. The result is that a significant number new nuclear power plants are an inevitability starting some time in the next decade.
That's just political realism.
As I point out elsewhere, conflict can be a good thing for creativity. The interesting new reactor designs are a result of addressing the more reasonable concerns of anti-nuclear activists. That's a good thing, although it has led to some bad feelings. All the legitimate concerns of the anti-nuclear movement haven't been fully addressed, but I think enough progress has been made to start building new plants on these designs.
I favor a measured approach in developing new nuclear technology. If we went on a crash problem to solve our energy problems (as some suggested in 2008), we'd be getting lots of new reactors with this same proven but obsolete design. In a couple decades we'd have a huge number of technological white elephants on our hands. What we should do is invest in building a small number of plants using two different approaches, so as to gain experience with them. That won't exacerbate the as yet unsolved problems of nuclear power unduly (e.g. waste disposal), and if one of the approaches is a bust it's not the end of the world. As we prepare to commit more to nuclear power, we can improve the grid, which will also incent an increase in sustainable sources such as wind and new technologies such as solar thermal.
What I'd like to see is greater dependency on electricity and greater diversity in the electricity supply, spreading the environmental impact and economic risks over multiple energy sources, and fostering competition over greater geographical areas.
Well, the core itself was designed by GE, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Not only is there the rest of the plant to consider, there's the process of procurement and the actual day to day operation to take into account. Reading the anthropological tea leaves to predict the success of a project is a dubious practice. There's no reason to believe that Japan has some kind of net cultural advantage over the US in avoiding this kind of nuclear accident.
True, Japan's formidable worth ethic and team cohesion are huge pluses, but that cohesion can be a double-edged sword when problems leading to shame and failure for the organization are concerned. Just as we might look on their team cohesion with some envy, they might look at American cultural tolerance for open conflict with some envy. Conflict can be a powerful creative force and empower a team to confront problems rather than kicking them down the road. Or it can lead to pointless bickering and a sullen sense of individual entitlement at the expense of the team. In America (or parts of it) having a public conflict with a superior doesn't spell a breakdown in the relationship or a lack of respect, just as in Japan giving an employee an open order doesn't imply a lack of respect.
Having led a multicultural engineering team, I'd say the capacity of the team isn't limited by the culture of its members, but by leadership understanding of how to work with that culture's style. I initially mishandled the team, because I didn't understand that people from some parts of the world aren't comfortable getting up in a public meeting and disagreeing with the boss. So I'd do stupid things like get up in a meeting and ask "What do you think of this plan? Do you think you could get this done in eight weeks?" when the person I was asking would never tell me to my face my plan was bad, and that it was totally unreasonable to ask for it in anything less than five months. If I wanted that information a beer after work and an oblique approach would have got the job done. And that's what engineering is: getting the job done with the materials available to you.
So we shouldn't be surprised when any culture produces either an engineering triumph or an engineering disaster. Engineering is hard and complicated, so I suspect that any tendency to cultural advantage or disadvantage in some scenario is neutralized by its opposite in another. And people don't come out of the cultural nurture factory perfectly uniform. Engineering talent is a rare gift, and that alone is enough to make someone atypical in any culture.
There's no place for cultural determinism in engineering. Would I want BP running a nuke in my neighborhood? No. But I wouldn't tar all of British engineering with that brush. Germany is famous for engineering fetishes, but in WW2 Hermann Göring publicly admitted to being "green with envy" over the engineering of the British de Havilland aircraft.
That's not possible. Market forces prevent unsafe designs from being built. Who would invest in a nuclear reactor that could melt down before its rated service life? Or in an automobile that put its occupants at unusual risk of death or injuries?
People would have to be really stupid to invest in such disasters waiting to happen ...
Oh, wait.
Your reasoning is impeccable, but I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
What's interesting here is how differently China plays this game. They're focused on long-term national prestige and influence, so they can tolerate being a few years behind by specifying the use of domestic products. That ensures the cash flow their enterprises need to catch up. That would. be unthinkable in the US, with the. exception of a few companies like Boeing, and. even then it's ideologically incorrect to be up front. about helping the chosen enterprise. The standard position is that the competitor kettle is blackened by government favoritism.
A lot of people are pointing out that there isn't much energy in a single "shot" from this machine, which is true, and some of those people are then drawing analogies based on the same total energy applied over a long time, which is bogus. You can't draw a nice rectangular hyperbola of time and power and say every point on that hyperbola is equivalent with respect to outcome because the energy is the same. There are time related phenomena which limit the destructive effect of low power, long duration events.
Take the razor blade. The total energy used spread over the entire mass of stainless steel isn't going to change that razor blade one bit, but the speed of heat conduction in steel is finite. If you concentrate the same amount of energy in the same tiny area, there will be more localized heating if it's 0.1J delivered in 100ns as opposed to the same amount of energy delivered in 100 days. Furthermore, this localized heating could cause secondary reactions, such as the iron burning.
Imagine you take a matchstick and put it on a hot plate set to 100 F (38 C) for a week. The same amount of energy pumped into the matchstick in one second will have a much more impressive effect as the match flares and lights.
Well, I think this is a situation where going straight for the dichotomy (either it's "okay" or "it's a crime worthy of the strongest punishment in our power to impose") maybe isn't such a great idea.
We should recognize the terrible potential such accusations have to disrupt an innocent teacher's life, while at the same time recognizing that children at the age of 12 or 13 bear less culpability for their actions than an adult would. The brains of children this age are less capable of impulse control than an adult brain; and children this age don't have an adult understanding of the consequences of their actions in any case.
The knee jerk urge to go for the maximal punishment available mirrors, in an ironic way, the childish impatience with restraint and reflection. I would suspend the kids, then make them get up in front of a school assembly -- or better yet an assembly of parents and students -- and issue a public apology and retraction. Then I'd set them to a rigorous program of lugubrious public service by way of restitution. That would be a better solution, leaving all involved better off.
I think officially you should call it: a Java-like language ?
I don't think so. Android programs are compiled with the standard JDK compiler then the resultant bytecode is cross compiled for Dalvik rather than the standard Java Virtual Machine, so clearly they are written in the Java language. I think you might mean that programs are written in a "Java-like execution environment", although that's a bit of a stretch; you could just as well say that dotNet's CLR is a "Java-like environment". In some ways that's *more* true than calling Dalvik "Java-like".
Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.
These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural third world classroom built in his honor ($125)? Maybe instead of that iPad for that special someone, you could pay for the education of five girls at $100 apiece; provide a dozen vaccinations to children at $45; or teach ten women to read at $50 apiece. You can reintegrate eight child soldiers to their community through education and apprenticeship programs for only $58 each.
I am amazed at the cynicism of some people. You make it sound like philanthropy is something working class people would never do. Well, *I'm* working class and *I've* done it. The power of the almighty dollar isn't just for the rich. You can do amazing things for so little. You can change somebody's life for what amounts to pocket change you'd never miss.
Sure, but you're talking about the limits of the speed of information transport. That's not the same thing as *timing*.
Suppose there were an absolute limit of 82 mph on how fast a baseball could mover. That means the fastest possible pitch would travel from the mound to home base in about 500ms. Suppose there was a pitcher who could consistently throw at 82mph, and you bet that you could beat any pitch he threw to home plate. You wouldn't wait to see the ball hit the catcher's glove before throwing your ball -- the best you could do is trail him by half a second. You'd watch for him to start throwing, and fire off your throw before the ball had even left his hand. Your pitch could arrive at the plate 400ms after his left his hand without violating the 82 mph physical limitation on ball speed because it would start *after* he had committed himself to throw, but *before* he had managed to release the ball.
Now in this game, getting to the plate 400ms after he releases his throw means you beat the pitcher. Next suppose there's a million dollar prize for the first ball to cross the plate after the pitcher releases his pitch. Somebody manages to shave a little more time off his wind-up and gets there in only 300ms after the pitcher releases his ball. So while everyone's ball takes 500ms to travel to the plate, there's a difference in 200ms between the first and last ball to arrive. So you work on quickly triggering your throw as soon as the pitcher starts to move, and eventually you manage to shave the time down to 50ms. A naive analysis would suggest you'd have to throw at 800mph to do that, but the real trick is that you can get your ball released faster. The advantage of shaving the time so much is that nobody is likely to be able to beat you to the plate without risking some spurious throws.
...but how do you draw an arbitrary line that's fair and agreeable to all? I don't believe that's possible, hence you can never draw a line at all.
Of course, if you insist on the line being "fair" AND "agreeable to all", because some people will never agree to any fair drawing of the line. There are probably a wide variety of ways to draw the line that would be fair.
Well, let's grant that inertia is useful. Why not set up non-profit hide speed trader that puts its profits back into the market, and ban anyone else from sub-second trading? Wouldn't that deliver all the benefits these guys supposedly do at a fraction of the cost? Wouldn't that be more fair to organizations that generate a lot of trades, since they'd benefit from this mechanism almost as often as they'd lose?
Except I can't vote this tax man's bosses out of office.
Depends on what you compare it it. A 100mm (roughly 4 inch) wafer of pure silicon could cost as much as $500 in single quantities for certain grades. That's certainly far more expensive than raw silk, although one must consider the cost of preparing the raw silk to be suitable for use in electronics.That's bound to be expensive in small quantities, but reduce itself greatly as the scale of the process increases.
Most likely this was a six degrees of separation style investigation, like the Muslims who were suspected of being terrorists because they frequently called the same telephone number that certain suspected terrorists also called. The number was a pizza delivery service.
Afifi's late father was the president of the Muslim Community Association in San Francisco. He moved back to Egypt in 2003, where he died in 2008. So it isn't hard to put this together. Afifi's as a businessman and community leader probably had a huge personal network. He was put on the watch list because he probably had two degrees of separation from a suspected terrorist, which made *him* a suspected terrorist. That means that the younger Afifi had *one* degree of separation from a suspected terrorist. When the elder Afifi moved back to Egypt, the younger Afifi went to visit him there. After that he was a person with one degree of separation from a suspected terrorist who had also traveled to the Middle East, and therefore a suspected terrorist as well. If the mechanic who spotted the GPS happened to be Muslim, *he's* probably a suspected terrorist now too, and if he has any customers who are Muslims they'd better not travel to the Middle East.
One term for such a steaming pile of investigatory turds would be "grasping at straws." If you think the FBI could not possibly be so screwed up, consider the case of the scholar who was hired to lecture at the FBI on his field of study: Islamic extremism. Afterward he was put on the watch list because surveillance of international calls showed he had called people with ties to Islamic extremists.
The problem with paranoia is that if *somebody* is out to get you, you won't be able to tell them from the countless people you *think* are out to get you, but are not.
According the Wikipedia policies, the existence of reliable third party sources on the topic is what make a topic notable. For example, if somebody wanted to create an entry on me, my facebook page would not be evidence of my notability. However, if I had been profiled in a newspaper article or TV show, that would be evidence of notability. Furthermore, I would remain notable even after those source were no longer available on-line.
From what I can see "notability" seems to be logically related to the "no original research" criterion. An article on a "non-notable" subject necessarily consists entirely of original research rather than citable sources. Conversely, if enough reliably sourced information exists to construct an article on a subject then apparently by the Wikipedia definition that subject should be considered notable (even if it's a bit silly).
On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable policy. Whether the policy is enforced uniformly and fairly in every case is a different matter. Something like a review site is a murky case. It might be referenced by its participants on their personal blogs, but that doesn't make it notable. There are some "fifteen minutes of fame" conditions that would make the site notable, but short of that precisely where such a site would cross over from non-notable to notable can't be clearly defined.
Ironically, a front page Slashdot article about Old Man Murray's non-notability might well make Old Man Murray notable.
The problem is that the "layman's vernacular" doesn't necessarily correspond to the charge. "Aiding the enemy" doesn't mean doing *anything* the enemy can gain benefit from; if it did then *all* infractions could be construed as "aiding the enemy" in some way. Returning late from leave could be a capital crime if we adopted such a broad interpretation of "aiding the enemy". We should not be so cavalier about throwing terms around like "treason" or "aiding the enemy".
I think a case can be made either way here under the Uniform Code. Article 104 defines "aiding the enemy" to include "without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to, or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly..."
So it seems the necessary elements of the crime in this case are:
(a) knowingly
(b) providing intelligence
(c) to the enemy, albeit indirectly.
So a charge of "aiding the enemy" is reasonable in this case, unless it is clear that the defense will be able to successfully refute any of these elements. It isn't hard to come up with some hypothetical defenses.
Suppose for a moment that the defense could show that Manning's intent was to release information about what he believed to be illegal activities undertaken by the military. While public knowledge of these infractions might benefit the enemy, it is not *intelligence* for the purposes of this law; it is something that *should* be made public to Americans to ensure proper civilian control of the military. His oath to defend the Constitution would arguably require him to make that information public.
Now let us further stipulate under this scenario that Manning's beliefs were patently unreasonable -- that any reasonable person would not believe releasing the information concerned had any connection with defending the Constitution. Such a reasonable person would know that collecting and forwarding the information would be "aiding the enemy" as defined under article 104. Private Manning, however, is *not* a reasonable person, and did not (under this scenario) *knowingly* aid the enemy. Being that unreasonable might well be a crime. Manning might be so despicably uninformed that it amounts to serious breach of duty punishable under the law. But even thought that would be *a* crime it would not be *the* crime defined by article 104.
This is purely hypothetical. We don't know that arguments either side will present and how well those arguments will be presented. We don't know the extenuating or damning circumstances that may come to light in a trial, so at this stage it is possible to reasonably entertain either opinion: that Maning is, or is not guilty of "aiding the enemy" as defined in the law establishing that offense.
Blaming China or low quality is misplacing the blame in any case. The low quality of so many Chinese-made goods isn't because China is unable to make good quality; it's because Americans are addicted to buying shiny cheap junk and the Chinese give us what the retailers ask for. The market segment that is willing to pay more for quality is quite small in America.
That said, Apple *does* target the quality minded consumer with its computers. Normally the design and build quality on Apple stuff I've seen is first rate; this example comes from a sample size of one. Even a top notch manufacturer can have a bad unit. Except for the unclosed ZIF socket the problems listed don't seem to be the kind that are easy to spot in inspection. Probably the worst issue was the excessive thermal paste, and that's under the heatsink.
Does this one unit mean that build quality is slipping at Apple suppliers? Possibly, but not necessarily. The negative publicity about Foxconn could mean Apple has more on its plate than quality these days when dealing with its suppliers, but that's pure speculation.
He shot Alexander Humilton.