Why does your son need his Dora, Oso and Little Einsteins?
And they're not even his. Have him try to sell tee shirts with pictures of these characters on them and see how quick Viacom and Disney go after his ass.
... but soon you realize that the book is written somewhat fractally. Concepts are stated, revisited and linked with others into a whole, adding details as the iterations progress.
So what you're saying is that it's a disorganized mess? No, that's wrong... It just looks like a disorganized mess - when you finally realize the subtle formula that underlies the whole, in the end, it's just random. Yeah - that's something I'd want to read.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
Hey, stupid, corporate taxes have gone down since the 1980's. But yet, the number of research labs run by corporations has gone down precipitously in that time. Why? I'll give you a hint - it has nothing to do with the amount of government expenditures. It has a lot to do with the fact that corporations don't see immediate profit in research and have closed down their labs. And, in fact, the government has actually subsidized corporate R&D since that time by giving R&D tax credits. So are you just ignoring facts, or what?
Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects.
Sometimes business people do not have the luxury of contemplating second- or third-order effects. The US military has a 2010 budget of approximately 1 trillion dollars. It currently has about 1.5 million personnel. This means it has the luxury of spending about $600,000 in burden cost for each of its employees. In my business (software), we spend ~$150,000 per person. Most industries have average burden costs of between 70-100,000. If you give me financial leeway to spend four to eight times as much (like the military has), I could do a much better job of considering second- and third-order effects. As it is, you often have very little leeway other than to screw your people over - e.g., you don't have the budget for the seven people you have to do the job with, so you overwork five, etc.
Yes, businesses could do better (and many of us have learned the principles you mentioned in your post). But assuming that businesses are run any worse (or better) than the military, once you factor in dollar amounts, is unwarranted. Plus, last time I checked, I couldn't send an employee to the stockade.
... demise of this country started about the same time that religious belief started to decline. The educational system is almost entirely under the control, certainly on the university level, of those that believe there is no God. As the unbelievers took control the sytem started to crumble and yet they almost entirely blame religion.
I'm sorry that things are going so poorly in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar.
Jeez, Woz, get a better handle. And quit bitching - the company's moved on. And people like monochrome in their computers... you can get the iBook in two colors - white and black - just like God intended. And He knows we've done something right, because the stock's only gone up 20X or so since you left.
a short logical leap to make, since they believe that blowing themselves up is a reasonable and sustainable tactic vs the largest military force in the history of the world
Why do you say that this is unsustainable? Or even unreasonable? When confronted with overwhelming force (who are not interested in negotiating because they *do* have overwhelming force), this is what you do. You make it uncomfortable enough so that, eventually, the overwhelming force chooses to negotiate or give up. And each over-reaction from the superior force gives you more recruits to fight your asymmetric war. It's worked countless times in the past. Why do you think it wouldn't work today?
In fact, I see that a large part of our strategy in 'stan is negotiating with the more moderate elements of the Taliban (who, even if you don't want to believe it, are really not a lot more than the political arm of Al Quaeda). This is how you "win" an asymmetric war - you negotiate with moderate members of the group, who "take appropriate measures" against radical elements of the group who are bothering you. You co-opt the moderates into the government, giving the disgruntled a voice, and voila, you declare victory.
I know that this doesn't go along with what a lot of you believe about terrorists but assuming that they are human beings who are doing this for political reasons, there are only two solutions - (a) kill them all or (b) negotiate a settlement. You may think that (c) "make the cost of attacking you high enough that they wouldn't even think of doing it" is a reasonable option, but history shows that it never is.
As with Marxism, Islamic terrorism is not about the poor rising up against oppressors.
Positive or negative, changes are almost never from the poor, who are busy trying to survive, or the rich, who are busy enjoying the "fruits of their labors" and preventing change that might remove the same. Dynamism - political, social, or technological - usually comes from the middle class. And usually the upper middle-class, as they have the most in the way of resources to achieve their ends.
The fact that you lump Marxism and Islamic terrorism together, without noticing that this is, in fact, the way of change in most things, exhibits that you value your ideology more than insight.
I wish I could be as paranoid as you, but then I'd have to have myself committed. Believe it or not, the majority of the people in the world don't want to kill you and, if every single one who wanted to kill "random American" showed up on our doorstep tomorrow and tried to blow themselves up or start killing people at random locations in the US, it probably wouldn't put even a reasonably-sized dent in the US population. I just don't know why people like you are so scared. If my having to die is the price for having a free society, I say, "Bring it on." Just admit it, you're a scared little wuss.
Sure there are better products than most apple stuff on a technical level but for the average consumer ease of use and just working properly are the most important features, and Apple tends to excel at both.
People here bash Apple and Jobs for precisely this reason. Most people here like technology for its own sake, rather than seeing it as a means to an end - if it's hard to use, it reinforces their '133t sense of superiority. Because they are blinded by this viewpoint (and don't want to lose their "specialness"), anyone who actually brings easy-to-use (albeit only incrementally improved) technology to normal people is obviously a tool of evil, allowing the masses into their secret wizard-cave.
In reality, the human factors engineering that Apple does is an important technical innovation in its own right. Not recognizing this just makes the bashers seem even smaller and more pathetic.
Apple is a follower just like every big corporation.
Yes, but the future is as much evolutionary as revolutionary. And Jobs has shown an unmatched ability to take technology that's crappy and hard-to-use and make incremental changes to it that makes it useful to someone who doesn't want to screw around with technology. In other words, "It's not technically innovative only if you think that human factors engineering is not a technical field."
... but the RIAA tried to kill the mp3 player by suing them hard and getting injunctions on sales.
And Steve was smart enough to work with the players to open up a market in a way that didn't get Apple's ass sued off. So even though it wasn't technically innovative in the hardware sense (although the Diamond Rio had a crappy UI, so the iPod actually was technically innovative, if you count human factors engineering as a technology), it was successful (and, yes, innovative, as none of the other players would even talk with the copyright holders) in a business sense.
I was recently puzzled by Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" ads, and really, MS's failure to push what was a really effective ad.
What? An ad that effectively said, "Our OS is so bad, we'll pay you to buy hardware that has it on it?" Wow, if that is what passes for an effective ad in the minds of MS boosters, I'd hate to see an ineffective one.
Actually, although much of its content is entertainment-related, it has some very good articles (read "often as good as other general-interest publications like Harper's, Vanity Fair, etc.") on politics, the economy, etc. Matt Tabibi's work on the economy is very nice and, even if I don't agree with his Libertarian leanings, PJ O'Rourke is always an interesting political read. In short, Rolling Stone stopped being a "counter-culture" icon sometime in the mid-80's (go to Mother Jones, the Utne Reader, and/or High Times for that sort of thing, if you want it) and has re-invented itself as a general interest magazine (whether it wants to admit it or not).
Ha ha. This is what "superior" geeks say to make themselves feel better about their sad lot in life.
But riddle me this, Batman... Who's really the smart one in this relationship? The one who's giving the orders and doing quite well doing so, or the one taking the orders that can be fired on a whim?
Actually, this is not the whole story (although it would be nice to have a single set of bogey-men to work around).
It is much more cost effective to upgrade existing rail lines than to build new ones (just the legal costs in acquiring the rights-of-way for new lines would put the cost into an astronomical range, even for a government program). The existing rail lines in the US are not owned by the government (as they are in many countries that have HS rail), but by private companies that are loathe to pay additional money for the cost of upgrading the infrastructure so that HS passenger rail could become a reality. I mean, it works well enough for moving freight that has to be across the country in two weeks; if you were a shareholder in these companies, why would you spend any more on it?
Also, if one allowed HS passenger rail on these lines, you might have to give passenger trains priority. That could spell longer idling times for freight engines, more energy wasted in stopping/re-starting the freight trains (which are much longer and carry much more tonnage than passenger rail), etc., which would result in lower profits for the freight carriers.
In short, the US made a deal with the devil in the 1800's, allowing a critical piece of its national infrastructure to be owned by private corporations (albeit with a great deal of public subsidies). It had the benefit of relatively fast build-out of rail mileage, but had the downside of creating a huge cost for anyone wanting to significantly alter the system.
So, it's not just the airline folks, it's the rail owners themselves who are against having HS passenger travel. Toss in a bunch of Libertarian-leaning Republicans who don't want anything done by the government, and it's no wonder that we can't get HS passenger rail here in the US.
It wasn't *that* long ago that executives didn't type their own memos and letters. Ask one to use a typewriter or a word processor and they would have laughed or wouldn't know how to do it.
And it wasn't that long ago when even first-level managers were in the same boat. And it's a shame those days have passed. No longer do you see cute young female secretaries and file clerks with pert bosoms and short skirts roaming the hallways, ready for a little bit of office work. It is a sad era we live in, indeed.
I was glad to hear today that MS at least wasn't threatening the wild species of coffee beans.
Well, the Gates Foundation (which derived most of its money from the Microsoft activities of its founder Bill Gates) is funding anti-AIDS efforts in Africa, which might lead to a higher population, and that might place more pressure on native coffee habitat! Close enough for Slashdot... So do I win the "six degrees" prize for bashing Microsoft today?
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
A government small enough to not take everything you have is a government small enough to not protect you from anything. This is fine if you actually happen to be an anarchist. Otherwise, you are as logically inconsistent as those "big government" types you dislike.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does your son need his Dora, Oso and Little Einsteins?
And they're not even his. Have him try to sell tee shirts with pictures of these characters on them and see how quick Viacom and Disney go after his ass.
You do know that Norton is the consumer brand for Symantec, don't you?
... but soon you realize that the book is written somewhat fractally. Concepts are stated, revisited and linked with others into a whole, adding details as the iterations progress.
So what you're saying is that it's a disorganized mess? No, that's wrong... It just looks like a disorganized mess - when you finally realize the subtle formula that underlies the whole, in the end, it's just random. Yeah - that's something I'd want to read.
It'll be more like a truck...
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
Hey, stupid, corporate taxes have gone down since the 1980's. But yet, the number of research labs run by corporations has gone down precipitously in that time. Why? I'll give you a hint - it has nothing to do with the amount of government expenditures. It has a lot to do with the fact that corporations don't see immediate profit in research and have closed down their labs. And, in fact, the government has actually subsidized corporate R&D since that time by giving R&D tax credits. So are you just ignoring facts, or what?
Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects.
Sometimes business people do not have the luxury of contemplating second- or third-order effects. The US military has a 2010 budget of approximately 1 trillion dollars. It currently has about 1.5 million personnel. This means it has the luxury of spending about $600,000 in burden cost for each of its employees. In my business (software), we spend ~$150,000 per person. Most industries have average burden costs of between 70-100,000. If you give me financial leeway to spend four to eight times as much (like the military has), I could do a much better job of considering second- and third-order effects. As it is, you often have very little leeway other than to screw your people over - e.g., you don't have the budget for the seven people you have to do the job with, so you overwork five, etc.
Yes, businesses could do better (and many of us have learned the principles you mentioned in your post). But assuming that businesses are run any worse (or better) than the military, once you factor in dollar amounts, is unwarranted. Plus, last time I checked, I couldn't send an employee to the stockade.
... demise of this country started about the same time that religious belief started to decline. The educational system is almost entirely under the control, certainly on the university level, of those that believe there is no God. As the unbelievers took control the sytem started to crumble and yet they almost entirely blame religion.
I'm sorry that things are going so poorly in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar.
Jeez, Woz, get a better handle. And quit bitching - the company's moved on. And people like monochrome in their computers... you can get the iBook in two colors - white and black - just like God intended. And He knows we've done something right, because the stock's only gone up 20X or so since you left.
Namaste...
The (not-Real) Fake Steve Jobs
a short logical leap to make, since they believe that blowing themselves up is a reasonable and sustainable tactic vs the largest military force in the history of the world
Why do you say that this is unsustainable? Or even unreasonable? When confronted with overwhelming force (who are not interested in negotiating because they *do* have overwhelming force), this is what you do. You make it uncomfortable enough so that, eventually, the overwhelming force chooses to negotiate or give up. And each over-reaction from the superior force gives you more recruits to fight your asymmetric war. It's worked countless times in the past. Why do you think it wouldn't work today?
In fact, I see that a large part of our strategy in 'stan is negotiating with the more moderate elements of the Taliban (who, even if you don't want to believe it, are really not a lot more than the political arm of Al Quaeda). This is how you "win" an asymmetric war - you negotiate with moderate members of the group, who "take appropriate measures" against radical elements of the group who are bothering you. You co-opt the moderates into the government, giving the disgruntled a voice, and voila, you declare victory.
I know that this doesn't go along with what a lot of you believe about terrorists but assuming that they are human beings who are doing this for political reasons, there are only two solutions - (a) kill them all or (b) negotiate a settlement. You may think that (c) "make the cost of attacking you high enough that they wouldn't even think of doing it" is a reasonable option, but history shows that it never is.
Because, if you allow vim to be extended, it may accidentally become an operating system.
... if you can get someone to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities.
The only absurdity you need to convince someone of to commit atrocities is that the ends justify the means.
As with Marxism, Islamic terrorism is not about the poor rising up against oppressors.
Positive or negative, changes are almost never from the poor, who are busy trying to survive, or the rich, who are busy enjoying the "fruits of their labors" and preventing change that might remove the same. Dynamism - political, social, or technological - usually comes from the middle class. And usually the upper middle-class, as they have the most in the way of resources to achieve their ends.
The fact that you lump Marxism and Islamic terrorism together, without noticing that this is, in fact, the way of change in most things, exhibits that you value your ideology more than insight.
I wish I could be as paranoid as you, but then I'd have to have myself committed. Believe it or not, the majority of the people in the world don't want to kill you and, if every single one who wanted to kill "random American" showed up on our doorstep tomorrow and tried to blow themselves up or start killing people at random locations in the US, it probably wouldn't put even a reasonably-sized dent in the US population. I just don't know why people like you are so scared. If my having to die is the price for having a free society, I say, "Bring it on." Just admit it, you're a scared little wuss.
Sure there are better products than most apple stuff on a technical level but for the average consumer ease of use and just working properly are the most important features, and Apple tends to excel at both.
People here bash Apple and Jobs for precisely this reason. Most people here like technology for its own sake, rather than seeing it as a means to an end - if it's hard to use, it reinforces their '133t sense of superiority. Because they are blinded by this viewpoint (and don't want to lose their "specialness"), anyone who actually brings easy-to-use (albeit only incrementally improved) technology to normal people is obviously a tool of evil, allowing the masses into their secret wizard-cave.
In reality, the human factors engineering that Apple does is an important technical innovation in its own right. Not recognizing this just makes the bashers seem even smaller and more pathetic.
Apple is a follower just like every big corporation.
Yes, but the future is as much evolutionary as revolutionary. And Jobs has shown an unmatched ability to take technology that's crappy and hard-to-use and make incremental changes to it that makes it useful to someone who doesn't want to screw around with technology. In other words, "It's not technically innovative only if you think that human factors engineering is not a technical field."
... but the RIAA tried to kill the mp3 player by suing them hard and getting injunctions on sales.
And Steve was smart enough to work with the players to open up a market in a way that didn't get Apple's ass sued off. So even though it wasn't technically innovative in the hardware sense (although the Diamond Rio had a crappy UI, so the iPod actually was technically innovative, if you count human factors engineering as a technology), it was successful (and, yes, innovative, as none of the other players would even talk with the copyright holders) in a business sense.
Why did you post this link? That ad was troubling on so many levels.
I was recently puzzled by Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" ads, and really, MS's failure to push what was a really effective ad.
What? An ad that effectively said, "Our OS is so bad, we'll pay you to buy hardware that has it on it?" Wow, if that is what passes for an effective ad in the minds of MS boosters, I'd hate to see an ineffective one.
... and he fit in to the style.
What style is that? Stupid?
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here to heckle all night. Try the veal!
What sort of media do you think Rolling Stone is?
Actually, although much of its content is entertainment-related, it has some very good articles (read "often as good as other general-interest publications like Harper's, Vanity Fair, etc.") on politics, the economy, etc. Matt Tabibi's work on the economy is very nice and, even if I don't agree with his Libertarian leanings, PJ O'Rourke is always an interesting political read. In short, Rolling Stone stopped being a "counter-culture" icon sometime in the mid-80's (go to Mother Jones, the Utne Reader, and/or High Times for that sort of thing, if you want it) and has re-invented itself as a general interest magazine (whether it wants to admit it or not).
Ha ha. This is what "superior" geeks say to make themselves feel better about their sad lot in life.
But riddle me this, Batman... Who's really the smart one in this relationship? The one who's giving the orders and doing quite well doing so, or the one taking the orders that can be fired on a whim?
Actually, this is not the whole story (although it would be nice to have a single set of bogey-men to work around).
It is much more cost effective to upgrade existing rail lines than to build new ones (just the legal costs in acquiring the rights-of-way for new lines would put the cost into an astronomical range, even for a government program). The existing rail lines in the US are not owned by the government (as they are in many countries that have HS rail), but by private companies that are loathe to pay additional money for the cost of upgrading the infrastructure so that HS passenger rail could become a reality. I mean, it works well enough for moving freight that has to be across the country in two weeks; if you were a shareholder in these companies, why would you spend any more on it?
Also, if one allowed HS passenger rail on these lines, you might have to give passenger trains priority. That could spell longer idling times for freight engines, more energy wasted in stopping/re-starting the freight trains (which are much longer and carry much more tonnage than passenger rail), etc., which would result in lower profits for the freight carriers.
In short, the US made a deal with the devil in the 1800's, allowing a critical piece of its national infrastructure to be owned by private corporations (albeit with a great deal of public subsidies). It had the benefit of relatively fast build-out of rail mileage, but had the downside of creating a huge cost for anyone wanting to significantly alter the system.
So, it's not just the airline folks, it's the rail owners themselves who are against having HS passenger travel. Toss in a bunch of Libertarian-leaning Republicans who don't want anything done by the government, and it's no wonder that we can't get HS passenger rail here in the US.
It wasn't *that* long ago that executives didn't type their own memos and letters. Ask one to use a typewriter or a word processor and they would have laughed or wouldn't know how to do it.
And it wasn't that long ago when even first-level managers were in the same boat. And it's a shame those days have passed. No longer do you see cute young female secretaries and file clerks with pert bosoms and short skirts roaming the hallways, ready for a little bit of office work. It is a sad era we live in, indeed.
I was glad to hear today that MS at least wasn't threatening the wild species of coffee beans.
Well, the Gates Foundation (which derived most of its money from the Microsoft activities of its founder Bill Gates) is funding anti-AIDS efforts in Africa, which might lead to a higher population, and that might place more pressure on native coffee habitat! Close enough for Slashdot... So do I win the "six degrees" prize for bashing Microsoft today?
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
A government small enough to not take everything you have is a government small enough to not protect you from anything. This is fine if you actually happen to be an anarchist. Otherwise, you are as logically inconsistent as those "big government" types you dislike.