Why? Because there aren't 200,000 manufacturing engineers ready to keep the factory going here, like there are in China. Steve Jobs told the President this answer when asked the exact same question on a phone call, which is documented in his biography.
This is why Obama wants to give the community college system a kick in the ass, so that we can actually train up people for this kind of effort.
I have it on good authority that with the introduction of Windows 8, the days of the convertible tablet / laptop as we know it are numbered from at least one major OEM. Expect to see some designs closer to the Asus Transformer, and less like the Tablet PC failure most of us have known for a decade.
We're a retail company with razor thin margins, and we don't move fast on anything. This is a proof of concept involving two divisions. If it works, there are 19 other divisions lined up behind.
The fact that we're even beating Microsoft to the market shows how far back they are.
Oh, and we've limited our Microsoft licensing by deploying 30,000 linux thin clients.
Oh, you mean just like the Lenovo X230 Tablet that's on my desk? Or maybe the X220 Tablet right next to it? Or the X201 Tablet or X200 Tablet in our lab? Or maybe the X61 tablet right next to those? Where did I say that no one has done this before? I'm saying that the above post is ridiculous to think that Apple never thought of a touchscreen notebook before, and would have a huge research gulf to cross in order to "catch up".
They probably just didn't think it would be a model that would actually sell, and looking at the rest of the convertible touchscreen notebook market, I'd say that they were right.
The ARM version isn't focused on enterprise though. It can't join Active Directory. Apps are Metro only, and you can't run legacy apps outside of something like Citrix anyway. Uses the same MDM infrastructure you've already stood up for iOS / Android, when the MDM vendor gets around to supporting it, rather than what you can use right now with the other two platforms.
Enterprise doesn't give a single fuck about Windows RT. They're waiting for the x86 version that can use the hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure they already have for managing Windows devices.
Do you really think that buried somewhere inside the prototype development labs at Cupertino that they haven't put a touchscreen on a MacBook at one point or another? There's a long history of Apple prototypes that get built and never shipped, because of various reasons.
Sprint has always made more money selling to operators than to end users. This goes all the way back to the company's creation, when they were part of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Little known fact: Sprint is an acronym (Southern Pacific Railroad Intercontinental Network Telecommunications).
They started with selling long distance service to corporations as "private lines" in competition to AT&T using the microwave network and fiber the railroad built on their right-of-way. With a court decision allowing them to have a switched network rather than just private lines, they got into retail sales.
They end up with cars that cost half their paycheck, because they haven't figured out that used cars exist. There's plenty of serviceable used cars, many available with warranties, for much less money than what people buy.
- The Constitution of the United States says that any treaty to which the United States shall be beholden must be ratified by two-thirds of the US Senate. - The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and prohibits the Congress from passing legislation limiting expression. - Every single Senator took an oath to uphold the Constitution upon taking office.
Any vote by the US Senate to ratify such UN action would be a direct violation of the Constitution which they swore to uphold. At the very least, I can't imagine that there are 67 senators looking to retire at the end of the term in which this treaty would be voted on for ratification; to say nothing of the Supreme Court throwing it out like a 105mph fast ball...
Hey, if this thing gets passed in other countries, maybe the US will become the best place to host Internet content...
You win the article because you made a Starflight reference. The only thing more epic would have been to make a reference to the Xenon Laser Cannon death machines from Wasteland, encountered in Base Cochise.
We wouldn't be able to get to the moon without the defense spending into the Redstone rocket, or the Titan II missile, which were the rockets used to get man into space to begin with in Mercury and Gemini. But that's just an inconvenient fact, I suppose.
You didn't just use the US Postal Service, which just got bailed out to the tune of $11B from a Congress that can't agree on anything, as an example of government succeeding where private business fails, did you?
Did you?
The USPS is projected to lose over $14B in operating losses this year alone. Without closing ~150 processing centers and buying out ~100,000 worker contracts (which they'll use some of that $11B to do), they'd be losing $21B/year by 2016 according to their own estimates. But don't worry, because part of the legislation that gives them that bailout says that there can't be any layoffs or buyouts before the November election, because we wouldn't want anyone to lose their seat in Congress behind this mess.
Source for all above numbers, and note the domain - it's not some right-wing rag, but the Huffington Post. The best part, is that they end the article with the following right after telling us that they got $11B from Congress:
The Postal Service, an independent agency of government, does not receive taxpayer money for its operations but is subject to congressional control.
Yeah, what a fantastically managed and well-run agency.
I was going to post the obligatory Skynet comment, but you beat me to it.
Instead, I'll expand by theorizing that Skynet wouldn't even need to have launch control of nuclear missiles itself if it just collapsed the economies of the first world - we'd get about blaming China soon enough, China would probably decide that they've had enough of Taiwan's bullshit and fire a missile or two across the water at them, drawing us into a quickly escalating war which sees us firing missiles at them, China firing back, and Russia getting in on the fun as well as NATO.
All because some dick at Goldman Sachs wanted to make a few basis points more profit by hacking together someone's AI research with a stock trading flavor.
That's all well and good, except that we know the court has effectively legislated from the bench in the past. Besides, there are several statements in US law including in the Constitution, which are arcane.
For example, an African-American citizen gets to vote as a single person today, rather than three-fifths of a person which is written in the Constitution.
I agree that Congress should write better laws, with language far more pithy than in use today (1000-page bills that nobody has read, etc.).
This would be the kind of court decision that would have Congress write an amendment codifying right of first sale, and having the House get somewhere around 418* "Yea" votes, followed by about 95* in the Senate. Obama would sign it, and roughy 50 states would ratify it.
Not only would it be the fasted amendment ever ratified, but it would be a clear message that the Supreme Court can go to hell if they're going to fuck around with the way commerce has worked in this country since before it was a country.
* there's always a few cranks that vote against the obvious flow, just to get their name in the press with a few quotes. They just want to grandstand, and nobody pays attention to them anyway.
Failing to make something work is not a feasible way to prove that something doesn't work. It only proves that you are currently incapable of doing it.
See: Microsoft's repeated attempts to make a smartphone that people actually like.
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If we don't fix the education system, and I mean right now, I'm going to go on a misspelling-induced violent rampage.
The "Hooked on Phonics" generation likely did more damage to employment in the US than traditional employer-based health care ever did.
Why? Because there aren't 200,000 manufacturing engineers ready to keep the factory going here, like there are in China. Steve Jobs told the President this answer when asked the exact same question on a phone call, which is documented in his biography.
This is why Obama wants to give the community college system a kick in the ass, so that we can actually train up people for this kind of effort.
Oh God, you mean that teenagers get jobs over there, just like they do in the US?
FOR SHAME!
We're a Windows shop, so I'm running Win7 Pro on it right now. Haven't had a chance to start playing with alternative OS versions on it yet.
I have it on good authority that with the introduction of Windows 8, the days of the convertible tablet / laptop as we know it are numbered from at least one major OEM. Expect to see some designs closer to the Asus Transformer, and less like the Tablet PC failure most of us have known for a decade.
We're a retail company with razor thin margins, and we don't move fast on anything. This is a proof of concept involving two divisions. If it works, there are 19 other divisions lined up behind.
The fact that we're even beating Microsoft to the market shows how far back they are.
Oh, and we've limited our Microsoft licensing by deploying 30,000 linux thin clients.
Oh, you mean just like the Lenovo X230 Tablet that's on my desk? Or maybe the X220 Tablet right next to it? Or the X201 Tablet or X200 Tablet in our lab? Or maybe the X61 tablet right next to those? Where did I say that no one has done this before? I'm saying that the above post is ridiculous to think that Apple never thought of a touchscreen notebook before, and would have a huge research gulf to cross in order to "catch up".
They probably just didn't think it would be a model that would actually sell, and looking at the rest of the convertible touchscreen notebook market, I'd say that they were right.
Yeah, there have been no tablets with a full OS on them previous to now. Not a single one.
The difference: Nobody likes full blown Windows on a tablet. That's why nobody, including you, remembers that they've existed for a decade.
The ARM version isn't focused on enterprise though. It can't join Active Directory. Apps are Metro only, and you can't run legacy apps outside of something like Citrix anyway. Uses the same MDM infrastructure you've already stood up for iOS / Android, when the MDM vendor gets around to supporting it, rather than what you can use right now with the other two platforms.
Enterprise doesn't give a single fuck about Windows RT. They're waiting for the x86 version that can use the hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure they already have for managing Windows devices.
That's odd, since the Fortune-20 business I work for just placed an order for 700+ iPads for a customer-facing application.
Nope, no dent there.
Do you really think that buried somewhere inside the prototype development labs at Cupertino that they haven't put a touchscreen on a MacBook at one point or another? There's a long history of Apple prototypes that get built and never shipped, because of various reasons.
Sprint has always made more money selling to operators than to end users. This goes all the way back to the company's creation, when they were part of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Little known fact: Sprint is an acronym (Southern Pacific Railroad Intercontinental Network Telecommunications).
They started with selling long distance service to corporations as "private lines" in competition to AT&T using the microwave network and fiber the railroad built on their right-of-way. With a court decision allowing them to have a switched network rather than just private lines, they got into retail sales.
Horseshit.
They end up with cars that cost half their paycheck, because they haven't figured out that used cars exist. There's plenty of serviceable used cars, many available with warranties, for much less money than what people buy.
- The Constitution of the United States says that any treaty to which the United States shall be beholden must be ratified by two-thirds of the US Senate.
- The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and prohibits the Congress from passing legislation limiting expression.
- Every single Senator took an oath to uphold the Constitution upon taking office.
Any vote by the US Senate to ratify such UN action would be a direct violation of the Constitution which they swore to uphold. At the very least, I can't imagine that there are 67 senators looking to retire at the end of the term in which this treaty would be voted on for ratification; to say nothing of the Supreme Court throwing it out like a 105mph fast ball...
Hey, if this thing gets passed in other countries, maybe the US will become the best place to host Internet content...
Great. And who enacted that legislation? The United States Congress.
The United States Congress is a branch of what? The Federal Government of the United States of America.
The USPS is being run into the ground by the government in which it is an agency. QED.
You win the article because you made a Starflight reference. The only thing more epic would have been to make a reference to the Xenon Laser Cannon death machines from Wasteland, encountered in Base Cochise.
What strategies AREN'T?
We wouldn't be able to get to the moon without the defense spending into the Redstone rocket, or the Titan II missile, which were the rockets used to get man into space to begin with in Mercury and Gemini. But that's just an inconvenient fact, I suppose.
You didn't just use the US Postal Service, which just got bailed out to the tune of $11B from a Congress that can't agree on anything, as an example of government succeeding where private business fails, did you?
Did you?
The USPS is projected to lose over $14B in operating losses this year alone. Without closing ~150 processing centers and buying out ~100,000 worker contracts (which they'll use some of that $11B to do), they'd be losing $21B/year by 2016 according to their own estimates. But don't worry, because part of the legislation that gives them that bailout says that there can't be any layoffs or buyouts before the November election, because we wouldn't want anyone to lose their seat in Congress behind this mess.
Source for all above numbers, and note the domain - it's not some right-wing rag, but the Huffington Post. The best part, is that they end the article with the following right after telling us that they got $11B from Congress:
The Postal Service, an independent agency of government, does not receive taxpayer money for its operations but is subject to congressional control.
Yeah, what a fantastically managed and well-run agency.
Because we don't need a functioning stock market to light the fuse on solid fueled ICBMs.
Gotta have money to build all those death machines!
I was going to post the obligatory Skynet comment, but you beat me to it.
Instead, I'll expand by theorizing that Skynet wouldn't even need to have launch control of nuclear missiles itself if it just collapsed the economies of the first world - we'd get about blaming China soon enough, China would probably decide that they've had enough of Taiwan's bullshit and fire a missile or two across the water at them, drawing us into a quickly escalating war which sees us firing missiles at them, China firing back, and Russia getting in on the fun as well as NATO.
All because some dick at Goldman Sachs wanted to make a few basis points more profit by hacking together someone's AI research with a stock trading flavor.
That's all well and good, except that we know the court has effectively legislated from the bench in the past. Besides, there are several statements in US law including in the Constitution, which are arcane.
For example, an African-American citizen gets to vote as a single person today, rather than three-fifths of a person which is written in the Constitution.
I agree that Congress should write better laws, with language far more pithy than in use today (1000-page bills that nobody has read, etc.).
This would be the kind of court decision that would have Congress write an amendment codifying right of first sale, and having the House get somewhere around 418* "Yea" votes, followed by about 95* in the Senate. Obama would sign it, and roughy 50 states would ratify it.
Not only would it be the fasted amendment ever ratified, but it would be a clear message that the Supreme Court can go to hell if they're going to fuck around with the way commerce has worked in this country since before it was a country.
* there's always a few cranks that vote against the obvious flow, just to get their name in the press with a few quotes. They just want to grandstand, and nobody pays attention to them anyway.
Failing to make something work is not a feasible way to prove that something doesn't work. It only proves that you are currently incapable of doing it.
See: Microsoft's repeated attempts to make a smartphone that people actually like.