Eh, I think it is feet actually, but in any case I'm sure you violate any of 47 other regulations in the course of two miles of driving, just like everybody else...
I'm not convinced of that. And, RedHat employs a lot of people that likely contribute to FOSS in their spare time. Their contributions are also likely slanted towards the sorts of boring things that kids in college don't like to work on, like stability, bugfixes, and hardware support for things that don't involve accelerometers.
Not many companies promote FOSS and I don't know that it is all that great for the community when one of them fails...
I doubt it - chances are the smartest employees would be the ones most likely to have defaulted. And, telling people that they could trade in all their student loan debt for a mediocre income for seven years is probably giving them a better deal than most of them are getting currently.
Doesn't "flipping" and a "bubble" require a continual increase in the perceived value of the good? I don't see employers rushing to increase starting wages for graduates. In fact in the current job market you've got college educated people taking jobs that used to be 'reserved' for those without a degree.
Yes, but the people taking out student loans are high school graduates, and not college graduates. High school graduates generally don't think of life after college - they think about all the great stories they hear about college from their parents and teachers. They've never had to pay off a loan of any significance.
They're being told by everybody they respect that the smartest move is to go to college, unless you're too dumb to cut it. Oh, and winners never quit and all that. The problem is that they're being set up to play in a game they can't win, and the only winning move is not to play unless they're among the top 5-10% of their class. However, what 18 year old wants to hear that they're just not cut out to work in a big corporation like on all the TV shows and that instead they're going to have to learn to be a plumber? No, kids aren't too cynical to dream yet, so they take the loans that are offered to them and then go looking for a bailout when they find that they've been played for fools by their elders.
I think this is one of the key issues. The job market in professional fields is becoming increasingly competitive. I work at a company that tries to hire the best and brightest in its field and largely succeeds, but layoffs are heavy and simply being way above average just doesn't cut it these days.
If you can't qualify for the scholarships, then pursue some other dream. The only thing you're doing by going into heavy debt is postponing the inevitable. I know of lots of kids who end up studying at a university for four years, getting into a load of debt, and then working retail or going into a trade. If they skipped university about the only thing they'd miss out on is the debt, and maybe a few good lectures. However, anybody can still audit a class and pay cash and get the full enrichment of the college experience, minus the degree (which you don't need anyway), and the need to follow a strict program of studies. You can also view lots of good lectures online/etc and there are things like The Teaching Company.
The problem is that if what the high school guidance counselors say were true, we wouldn't have any garbage collectors...
I don't think that STEM degrees are the real problem here - well, for the most part (outsourcing is still hitting these areas hard and something needs to be done about that).
I think the big issue is with the 50 bazillion people who go to college undeclared or end up with business degrees, communications degrees, the arts/humanities, etc. These people end up well rounded and nearly unemployable. A loan only makes sense if you're financing something that has an ROI. Now, I'm all for the humanities and people studying in less-productive degrees, but it shouldn't be financed with loans.
While I agree with much of what you propose, your bit about the college being at risk if the student defaults could be problematic. A student upon graduation typically has a degree, no assets in their name, and a bunch of debt. In such a situation it almost always makes sense to just declare bankruptcy, which is what everybody used to do in the past. So, a loan basically becomes a grant, and then students put their lives on hold for 7 years to clear their credit records (though they can still rent/lease/etc).
On the other hand, if the college isn't at risk then we just keep the bubble going forever. Lenders have to be at risk to enforce lending restrictions.
I guess the college could be allowed to deny that you attended if you default, or something like that. So, if you don't consider your degree worthless then you need to pay up.
I'm sure the art department will protest such an arrangement...
Doing stuff like this allows you to put EVERYBODY in a huge dragnet and see who is worth looking into more closely. You don't have to actually use any of the data you collect as evidence. You simply need to figure out who to target with legal methods.
Suppose I sniff thousands of phone calls and find out that you are doing something I don't like - such as making drugs, or copying movies, or saying bad things about your school on Facebook, or whatever. I can't use that as evidence, but I know who you are now. Then I just walk down your street and notice that your grass is taller than the local ordinance allows, or claim that I heard a shout for help that seemed to be coming from your house and knock on the door. You open up the door and I happen to see something inside that is suspicious, or whatever. Now I have probable cause and can get a warrant, and I can carve another notch in my baton or whatever.
Legally searching houses is expensive, and it ticks people off when you search the wrong ones. On the other hand, mass interception of phone/internet/etc is cheap and tells you who to target with legal techniques.
Yup, listen in on conversation illegally and find out that the suspect will have incriminating evidence in their car on Tuesday at 10AM. Then at 10AM on Tuesday a cop happens to notice that they didn't signal 300 yards before changing lanes and pulls them over. Then they notice something unusual and search the car, and boom, you have a legal search finding evidence that can be used. The phone tap that led to it all would simply not be mentioned in court.
Everybody violates the law 50 times a day, so if the cops need a reason to search you at any time chances are that you'll give them a legally valid one.
Yeah, but voting for either of the two main parties will basically leave us in the same bind for the next 1000 years. I'd rather see 4 years of somebody I disagree with more if it meant a real chance at changing the game.
The reality is that if the Greens were to actually get 10% of the vote or something like that the Democrats would start taking them seriously and change their platforms accordingly. The best way to give up your political power is to send somebody the message that you'll vote for them no matter what they do - they have zero incentive to keep you happy.
Housing isn't something that ever pays off - it is an asset, and perhaps it might appreciate in value, but it doesn't actually generate any income unless you rent it out.
Things that pay off are things like bridges/roads/etc.
Capital are things that you spend money on now to make money over time - like a factory, or a robot, or a computer if your business needs one to operate. Things that you buy to enjoy shouldn't be considered capital, since they don't make you money.
Borrowing to spend on capital can be a wise choice. Borrowing to enjoy something often is not, but sometimes it beats the alternatives..
The problem in most of these cases is the perennial issue where control over the temperature does not rest with the person paying the bills... The more complex solutions try to resolve this problem by assuming that by making it difficult to manipulate the system the people who contribute the least to the bill will end up not being able to figure out how to mess with things.
My solution was to pick out a thermostat for the upstairs (where I rarely go) that has a lockout, and so far nobody has bothered to figure out how to bypass it. At times I'm tempted to do the same downstairs...
Yup - I think that the Reader team was in competition with the Photoshop team to see which app could display more plugin loading messages on its startup banner...
This is why we need to improve access control policies. Right now all your processes run under the same privilege level - your user account. I have no issues with Acrobat/etc opening its preferences file - but it shouldn't have access to anything else except for read-access to the file it was invoked upon.
What you need is a privilege model that is more granular than the user. Having write access to your home directory isn't really much more secure than running as root on a single user machine.
Android works this way by sandboxing individual apps (with the exception of the SD card, which is all or nothing). I think we need something a little better than this, but this is the general concept. SELinux goes a long way towards this.
I'd go a step further. While most people don't mess with their PC, they indirectly benefit from the fact that it can be done.
The openness of the PC has resulted in OS competition. Now, MS does dominate the landscape with what is probably 99% of the non-Apple PC OS market share. However, the fact that alternatives exist forces them to compete to some extent on price. In the server world they have far less market share - I imagine that in the typical datacenter relatively few servers directly boot windows, and are more likely to boot some hypervisor instead.
You don't actually have to hack your system to benefit from it being open. I also don't have to subscribe to Sprint to benefit from the fact that their existence helps to keep prices down.
Note that you'll not see the words "clean room" anywhere in the Copyright Law. It is a fairly bulletproof way to get around any accusation that you're outright copying code and that any duplication is purely coincidental or non-creative in nature. However, it is not the only way to proceed.
Generally copying code strictly required for interoperability is an accepted exception to copyright law, so you don't have to jump through hoops when you do it.
Plus, the meaning of derived work is a bit murky in any case. If I send you ABCD and you send me GKJL it is pretty hard to argue that the one is a derivative of the other simply because you wrote it after looking at my ABCD. The fact that they serve the same function also shouldn't matter, since function isn't copyrightable.
Skype and Google Voice have very little in common. Google Voice is married to the phone system for the most part - it doesn't support SIP/etc, although there are some ways to get into it via Gmail or Google Talk. I don't think it really is a direct Skype compeitor per se.
Now, if Google Voice added SIP support it would be the perfect Skype replacement. Well, I guess some people use the video features, and for that you'd need to use a different protocol but there are plenty of open ones to choose from.
That is what drives me nuts about these popular services - none of them just use the standard protocols and so you're stuck doing it from a browser or from a handful of platforms. If they just gave me SIP access I could just punch the details into my SIP clients and I'd be all set...
I think the key there was that the operations took place in confined waters - like the Persian Gulf. I don't think that modern carrier tactics are viable in such a theater against a truly prepared adversary. Modern anti-ship missiles travel about 150 miles in a line and will destroy any ship they pass within a few miles of - so if you have enough and a vague idea of where a ship is in someplace like the Gulf you can do quite a bit of damage. In such a constrained area I suspect that even submarines would be pretty vulnerable, especially in straits.
I think that carriers are more viable in blue waters where an attack could come from anywhere in thousands of square miles of ocean. Obviously the closer they get to shore the more vulnerable they are, but of course the more useful they are as well.
Against an island carriers would be expected to be much more effective since the island has a much larger area to control to keep the carrier away. Against a shoreline they would be more at risk, and operating in what amounts to a near-lake like the Persian Gulf they would be extremely vulnerable.
Carriers would be potentially very effective at controlling large areas of open ocean and in anti-shipping operations. They would keep the enemy pretty far from your shores as well.
Against a country like Russia I doubt they'd be terribly effective. However, against a nation like China (large ocean border) I think they could be pretty useful even today. If the Chinese were to develop a much better submarine force it could help them to fend off carrier groups - my understanding is that they're currently not really up to that.
Yup, right now at work we're slowly letting the last few contractors on our development team leave as we ramp our spend down to zero for EOY, and we know we need to do another round of development next year. Good thing that there is zero cost associated with ramping up development on a large custom software project, and no hit to quality when developers have no idea what subtle interactions exist in the system.
Oh, but it is all well-documented, if you read the three filing cabinets worth of documents...
Ok, let's take the G1 as an example - the only 3-year-old android phone on the list. Every iPhone ran the latest software release through 3 years. The G1 vendor supplied image is Android 1.6, I think. Actually, it might be 1.5 depending on your carrier/etc (I ran Cyanogenmod on it so my memory is hazy here).
So, what does Android 1.5 not do that Android 2.3 does do? Well, how about installing apps to the SD card, instead of to the G1's VERY limited internal flash? How about the ability to run Google Navigate (you know, the GPS navigation app that people take for granted on Android that wasn't actually introduced until 1.6)? Loads of apps won't run on Android 1.5 - no doubt including updates to apps that used to run on 1.5.
In contrast any iPhone will run all the apps in the app store for 3 years after you buy it.
Look, I still prefer Android, but this is really is something they are messing up on. It seems crazy that you buy a phone with a 2 year contract, and then you don't even get security updates for those two years...
Uh, you have an interesting definition of "supported."
Supported means that if you have a problem (say a remote code exploit in the browser) it just gets magically fixed for you. That is what makes Windows XP supported, and Windows 2000 not supported.
If you buy an Android phone today and somebody comes out with a remote exploit for it tomorrow, I'd say odds are at least 50% that you'll be left hanging.
Look, I love Android, but it has LOUSY vendor support. I'd never buy an iPhone, but they are VERY well supported from a software standpoint.
And yes, I run Cyanogenmod on my Android phone (both my current one and my original G1 and before that I was running JF et all). Vendors don't support that, and in fact go out of their way to make that difficult or impossible to do.
The G1 is on the chart. It is actually one of the better supported ones actually, probably owing to the fact that it was identical to the ADP.
Google typically abandons their own phones a year after they come out with them, and that is about how long after the Nexus One came out that it got its last software update. The ADP was abandoned about a year after it came out. I wouldn't be surprised if ICS is the last release for the Nexus S...
Yup, I'm amazed at stupid things executives do because they are out of touch. I knew a guy who worked close to sales and they managed to work out a major deal to sell a ton of equipment to a major customer, which would also get them in the door for lots of repeat business down the road/etc. The thing was huge, and because the customer was happy with their products and services they didn't require competitive bids/etc on the deal.
They sent the deal to their VP for approval/etc, and the VP decided that they needed to add some value, which basically meant trying to squeeze an extra 10% or whatever out of the customer. Suddenly the customer is ticked off and has a sour taste in what previously was a happy engagement. Now the customer is talking about soliciting competitive bids and the whole things is in jeopardy, and even if it goes through it becomes a strained relationship. The company making the sale REALLY needed the sale too since they were in hard times and this was one of their biggest deals to date - and apparently the sale was done at typical rates/etc.
Too many managers at too many companies are just out of touch with what is going on at the ground level. A CEO really does need to understand the business a company is in. Now, the CEO of Walmart doesn't need to visit every store annually or know every product they sell, but they do need to understand why it is that people go to Walmart vs someplace else and what it takes to maintain that advantage. The CEO of a company that sells products needs to understand why people buy those products and how they can be improved upon and not just that they spend money on ads and R&D and manufacturing and sales. Officers need to get away from the spreadsheets and understand the realities of the business they are in.
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Eh, I think it is feet actually, but in any case I'm sure you violate any of 47 other regulations in the course of two miles of driving, just like everybody else...
I'm not convinced of that. And, RedHat employs a lot of people that likely contribute to FOSS in their spare time. Their contributions are also likely slanted towards the sorts of boring things that kids in college don't like to work on, like stability, bugfixes, and hardware support for things that don't involve accelerometers.
Not many companies promote FOSS and I don't know that it is all that great for the community when one of them fails...
I doubt it - chances are the smartest employees would be the ones most likely to have defaulted. And, telling people that they could trade in all their student loan debt for a mediocre income for seven years is probably giving them a better deal than most of them are getting currently.
Doesn't "flipping" and a "bubble" require a continual increase in the perceived value of the good? I don't see employers rushing to increase starting wages for graduates. In fact in the current job market you've got college educated people taking jobs that used to be 'reserved' for those without a degree.
Yes, but the people taking out student loans are high school graduates, and not college graduates. High school graduates generally don't think of life after college - they think about all the great stories they hear about college from their parents and teachers. They've never had to pay off a loan of any significance.
They're being told by everybody they respect that the smartest move is to go to college, unless you're too dumb to cut it. Oh, and winners never quit and all that. The problem is that they're being set up to play in a game they can't win, and the only winning move is not to play unless they're among the top 5-10% of their class. However, what 18 year old wants to hear that they're just not cut out to work in a big corporation like on all the TV shows and that instead they're going to have to learn to be a plumber? No, kids aren't too cynical to dream yet, so they take the loans that are offered to them and then go looking for a bailout when they find that they've been played for fools by their elders.
I think this is one of the key issues. The job market in professional fields is becoming increasingly competitive. I work at a company that tries to hire the best and brightest in its field and largely succeeds, but layoffs are heavy and simply being way above average just doesn't cut it these days.
If you can't qualify for the scholarships, then pursue some other dream. The only thing you're doing by going into heavy debt is postponing the inevitable. I know of lots of kids who end up studying at a university for four years, getting into a load of debt, and then working retail or going into a trade. If they skipped university about the only thing they'd miss out on is the debt, and maybe a few good lectures. However, anybody can still audit a class and pay cash and get the full enrichment of the college experience, minus the degree (which you don't need anyway), and the need to follow a strict program of studies. You can also view lots of good lectures online/etc and there are things like The Teaching Company.
The problem is that if what the high school guidance counselors say were true, we wouldn't have any garbage collectors...
I don't think that STEM degrees are the real problem here - well, for the most part (outsourcing is still hitting these areas hard and something needs to be done about that).
I think the big issue is with the 50 bazillion people who go to college undeclared or end up with business degrees, communications degrees, the arts/humanities, etc. These people end up well rounded and nearly unemployable. A loan only makes sense if you're financing something that has an ROI. Now, I'm all for the humanities and people studying in less-productive degrees, but it shouldn't be financed with loans.
While I agree with much of what you propose, your bit about the college being at risk if the student defaults could be problematic. A student upon graduation typically has a degree, no assets in their name, and a bunch of debt. In such a situation it almost always makes sense to just declare bankruptcy, which is what everybody used to do in the past. So, a loan basically becomes a grant, and then students put their lives on hold for 7 years to clear their credit records (though they can still rent/lease/etc).
On the other hand, if the college isn't at risk then we just keep the bubble going forever. Lenders have to be at risk to enforce lending restrictions.
I guess the college could be allowed to deny that you attended if you default, or something like that. So, if you don't consider your degree worthless then you need to pay up.
I'm sure the art department will protest such an arrangement...
Doing stuff like this allows you to put EVERYBODY in a huge dragnet and see who is worth looking into more closely. You don't have to actually use any of the data you collect as evidence. You simply need to figure out who to target with legal methods.
Suppose I sniff thousands of phone calls and find out that you are doing something I don't like - such as making drugs, or copying movies, or saying bad things about your school on Facebook, or whatever. I can't use that as evidence, but I know who you are now. Then I just walk down your street and notice that your grass is taller than the local ordinance allows, or claim that I heard a shout for help that seemed to be coming from your house and knock on the door. You open up the door and I happen to see something inside that is suspicious, or whatever. Now I have probable cause and can get a warrant, and I can carve another notch in my baton or whatever.
Legally searching houses is expensive, and it ticks people off when you search the wrong ones. On the other hand, mass interception of phone/internet/etc is cheap and tells you who to target with legal techniques.
Yup, listen in on conversation illegally and find out that the suspect will have incriminating evidence in their car on Tuesday at 10AM. Then at 10AM on Tuesday a cop happens to notice that they didn't signal 300 yards before changing lanes and pulls them over. Then they notice something unusual and search the car, and boom, you have a legal search finding evidence that can be used. The phone tap that led to it all would simply not be mentioned in court.
Everybody violates the law 50 times a day, so if the cops need a reason to search you at any time chances are that you'll give them a legally valid one.
Yeah, but voting for either of the two main parties will basically leave us in the same bind for the next 1000 years. I'd rather see 4 years of somebody I disagree with more if it meant a real chance at changing the game.
The reality is that if the Greens were to actually get 10% of the vote or something like that the Democrats would start taking them seriously and change their platforms accordingly. The best way to give up your political power is to send somebody the message that you'll vote for them no matter what they do - they have zero incentive to keep you happy.
Housing isn't something that ever pays off - it is an asset, and perhaps it might appreciate in value, but it doesn't actually generate any income unless you rent it out.
Things that pay off are things like bridges/roads/etc.
Capital are things that you spend money on now to make money over time - like a factory, or a robot, or a computer if your business needs one to operate. Things that you buy to enjoy shouldn't be considered capital, since they don't make you money.
Borrowing to spend on capital can be a wise choice. Borrowing to enjoy something often is not, but sometimes it beats the alternatives..
The problem in most of these cases is the perennial issue where control over the temperature does not rest with the person paying the bills... The more complex solutions try to resolve this problem by assuming that by making it difficult to manipulate the system the people who contribute the least to the bill will end up not being able to figure out how to mess with things.
My solution was to pick out a thermostat for the upstairs (where I rarely go) that has a lockout, and so far nobody has bothered to figure out how to bypass it. At times I'm tempted to do the same downstairs...
Yup - I think that the Reader team was in competition with the Photoshop team to see which app could display more plugin loading messages on its startup banner...
This is why we need to improve access control policies. Right now all your processes run under the same privilege level - your user account. I have no issues with Acrobat/etc opening its preferences file - but it shouldn't have access to anything else except for read-access to the file it was invoked upon.
What you need is a privilege model that is more granular than the user. Having write access to your home directory isn't really much more secure than running as root on a single user machine.
Android works this way by sandboxing individual apps (with the exception of the SD card, which is all or nothing). I think we need something a little better than this, but this is the general concept. SELinux goes a long way towards this.
I'd go a step further. While most people don't mess with their PC, they indirectly benefit from the fact that it can be done.
The openness of the PC has resulted in OS competition. Now, MS does dominate the landscape with what is probably 99% of the non-Apple PC OS market share. However, the fact that alternatives exist forces them to compete to some extent on price. In the server world they have far less market share - I imagine that in the typical datacenter relatively few servers directly boot windows, and are more likely to boot some hypervisor instead.
You don't actually have to hack your system to benefit from it being open. I also don't have to subscribe to Sprint to benefit from the fact that their existence helps to keep prices down.
Note that you'll not see the words "clean room" anywhere in the Copyright Law. It is a fairly bulletproof way to get around any accusation that you're outright copying code and that any duplication is purely coincidental or non-creative in nature. However, it is not the only way to proceed.
Generally copying code strictly required for interoperability is an accepted exception to copyright law, so you don't have to jump through hoops when you do it.
Plus, the meaning of derived work is a bit murky in any case. If I send you ABCD and you send me GKJL it is pretty hard to argue that the one is a derivative of the other simply because you wrote it after looking at my ABCD. The fact that they serve the same function also shouldn't matter, since function isn't copyrightable.
Skype and Google Voice have very little in common. Google Voice is married to the phone system for the most part - it doesn't support SIP/etc, although there are some ways to get into it via Gmail or Google Talk. I don't think it really is a direct Skype compeitor per se.
Now, if Google Voice added SIP support it would be the perfect Skype replacement. Well, I guess some people use the video features, and for that you'd need to use a different protocol but there are plenty of open ones to choose from.
That is what drives me nuts about these popular services - none of them just use the standard protocols and so you're stuck doing it from a browser or from a handful of platforms. If they just gave me SIP access I could just punch the details into my SIP clients and I'd be all set...
I think the key there was that the operations took place in confined waters - like the Persian Gulf. I don't think that modern carrier tactics are viable in such a theater against a truly prepared adversary. Modern anti-ship missiles travel about 150 miles in a line and will destroy any ship they pass within a few miles of - so if you have enough and a vague idea of where a ship is in someplace like the Gulf you can do quite a bit of damage. In such a constrained area I suspect that even submarines would be pretty vulnerable, especially in straits.
I think that carriers are more viable in blue waters where an attack could come from anywhere in thousands of square miles of ocean. Obviously the closer they get to shore the more vulnerable they are, but of course the more useful they are as well.
Against an island carriers would be expected to be much more effective since the island has a much larger area to control to keep the carrier away. Against a shoreline they would be more at risk, and operating in what amounts to a near-lake like the Persian Gulf they would be extremely vulnerable.
Carriers would be potentially very effective at controlling large areas of open ocean and in anti-shipping operations. They would keep the enemy pretty far from your shores as well.
Against a country like Russia I doubt they'd be terribly effective. However, against a nation like China (large ocean border) I think they could be pretty useful even today. If the Chinese were to develop a much better submarine force it could help them to fend off carrier groups - my understanding is that they're currently not really up to that.
Yup, right now at work we're slowly letting the last few contractors on our development team leave as we ramp our spend down to zero for EOY, and we know we need to do another round of development next year. Good thing that there is zero cost associated with ramping up development on a large custom software project, and no hit to quality when developers have no idea what subtle interactions exist in the system.
Oh, but it is all well-documented, if you read the three filing cabinets worth of documents...
They also turn travel into an epic saga while costing about as much as a plane...
Arguably you can't conclude that again unless you re-run the study and perform the same analysis.
You can't decide how to analyze the data AFTER you collect it. That leads to all kinds of bias.
Ok, let's take the G1 as an example - the only 3-year-old android phone on the list. Every iPhone ran the latest software release through 3 years. The G1 vendor supplied image is Android 1.6, I think. Actually, it might be 1.5 depending on your carrier/etc (I ran Cyanogenmod on it so my memory is hazy here).
So, what does Android 1.5 not do that Android 2.3 does do? Well, how about installing apps to the SD card, instead of to the G1's VERY limited internal flash? How about the ability to run Google Navigate (you know, the GPS navigation app that people take for granted on Android that wasn't actually introduced until 1.6)? Loads of apps won't run on Android 1.5 - no doubt including updates to apps that used to run on 1.5.
In contrast any iPhone will run all the apps in the app store for 3 years after you buy it.
Look, I still prefer Android, but this is really is something they are messing up on. It seems crazy that you buy a phone with a 2 year contract, and then you don't even get security updates for those two years...
Uh, you have an interesting definition of "supported."
Supported means that if you have a problem (say a remote code exploit in the browser) it just gets magically fixed for you. That is what makes Windows XP supported, and Windows 2000 not supported.
If you buy an Android phone today and somebody comes out with a remote exploit for it tomorrow, I'd say odds are at least 50% that you'll be left hanging.
Look, I love Android, but it has LOUSY vendor support. I'd never buy an iPhone, but they are VERY well supported from a software standpoint.
And yes, I run Cyanogenmod on my Android phone (both my current one and my original G1 and before that I was running JF et all). Vendors don't support that, and in fact go out of their way to make that difficult or impossible to do.
The G1 is on the chart. It is actually one of the better supported ones actually, probably owing to the fact that it was identical to the ADP.
Google typically abandons their own phones a year after they come out with them, and that is about how long after the Nexus One came out that it got its last software update. The ADP was abandoned about a year after it came out. I wouldn't be surprised if ICS is the last release for the Nexus S...
Yup, I'm amazed at stupid things executives do because they are out of touch. I knew a guy who worked close to sales and they managed to work out a major deal to sell a ton of equipment to a major customer, which would also get them in the door for lots of repeat business down the road/etc. The thing was huge, and because the customer was happy with their products and services they didn't require competitive bids/etc on the deal.
They sent the deal to their VP for approval/etc, and the VP decided that they needed to add some value, which basically meant trying to squeeze an extra 10% or whatever out of the customer. Suddenly the customer is ticked off and has a sour taste in what previously was a happy engagement. Now the customer is talking about soliciting competitive bids and the whole things is in jeopardy, and even if it goes through it becomes a strained relationship. The company making the sale REALLY needed the sale too since they were in hard times and this was one of their biggest deals to date - and apparently the sale was done at typical rates/etc.
Too many managers at too many companies are just out of touch with what is going on at the ground level. A CEO really does need to understand the business a company is in. Now, the CEO of Walmart doesn't need to visit every store annually or know every product they sell, but they do need to understand why it is that people go to Walmart vs someplace else and what it takes to maintain that advantage. The CEO of a company that sells products needs to understand why people buy those products and how they can be improved upon and not just that they spend money on ads and R&D and manufacturing and sales. Officers need to get away from the spreadsheets and understand the realities of the business they are in.