No, the problem is that the fan base is insane and expectations are through the roof. If two blackberries in a million are faulty, it'll never make it onto slashdot. The two account execs who own them just don't care about the product enough to bitch. If two iPhones in a million show up with some hairline cracks on them, all of a sudden it's on Consumerist and MacRumors and every other tech website.
Sorry, but all products have flaws. You're delusional if you think that even 1% of companies are able to find all the bugs in their product before it makes it out the door. Even my f-ing Honda has had recalls.
I think the goal is consumer satisfaction, and Apple has consistently proven themselves capable in delivering a product that people love. The problem is that people love it so very, very much that they're willing to spend 30 hours posting about perceived slowness in the interface or perceived slowness in download speeds. Ultimately, no one is producing a product like the iPhone that surpasses the iPhone's user experience, and that counts for a lot.
Government agencies like the DOT does testing all the time. Ever pass a sign on the highway saying you're going to be on experimental pavement for the next 500'?
So NASCAR isn't objective and competition? I realize many people think NASCAR is all about going left a few hundred times and then drinking a beer, but they _do_ race on road courses. Watching them at Watkins Glenn is like watching elephants dance. Any professional level auto racing is also much, much more physically demanding than a lot of more conventional sports.
Yes, however an equally effective strategy would be to tell all the speculators that trolls have been visiting House and Senate members in private meetings and have promised to lead everyone to a vast supply of light sweet crude, but only on the condition that first we invest $50B in green energy. I mean, if we're living in a fantasy world, we might as well turn it to our advantage...
Correct. Lots of people are allowed onto your property if it's necessary to complete their duties. This includes people like game wardens, bounty hunters, police, surveyors, etc. Read about Invitees and Licensees on Wikipedia.
Google doesn't have any such justification to be on your land. I dunno about the specifics regarding private roads, since I suspect they fall into some kind of gray area...
Is that a joke? Yeah, innovation (and design) is what separates Apple from Microsoft, but is there something more important than innovation and design in the computer industry?
I don't think that's entirely fair. Many people want what the iPhone offers. There's nothing wrong with wanting something beautiful or with wanting something that exists almost purely to please the user, sometimes at the expense of raw power or functionality. There's something to the fact that iPhone users both slurp more data off the network and are more satisfied with their smart phones than others. I work with a bunch of non-techies but when I hand them the iPhone to check out, they're usually able to figure it out how to make a call or browse the web in under a minute. Less if they're already mac users that know the safari icon. That's pretty impressive given that its OS operates completely differently from any other cell phone. As is the owner's manual which is about 1/10 the size of the one on my old Nokia with 1/10 the features
Apple design is usually about what isn't offered, and that's like a slap in the face to many geeks who measure THEIR penises by feature count. Figuring out what NOT to include is probably more difficult than any other component of design. There's a tradeoff between complexity and usability. Look at Google's home page. Look at modernist architecture. Look at most top notch products, really.
There are plenty of options for people looking for something more tailored to email or text messaging. However, I'd be interest to know if you can name a product that comes closer to the mythical device convergence we've been hearing about for ten years.
Yeah, it ain't perfect, but it's not like anyone else is making the perfect device, either.
Pittsburgh doesn't belong on this list _at all_. Yes, there's tons of shit in the ground, and the air sucks by US standards, but c'mon. Anyone who has traveled to _any_ third world city knows there's no comparison in terms of livability. Pittsburgh is paradise by those standards. Even compared to most european cities, where everyone is buzzing around on catalyst-free scooters and 2-stroke engines, Pittsburgh air is tasty.
"Normal practice" doesn't make something right. Business people are expected to give a lot of their lives to their companies, and the line between work and not-work has blurred considerably over the last 10 years. A 60-100 hour work week is not considered at all unusual. Combine that with working from home, checking in several times a day while on vacation, and being on-call 24/7 and you're intruding into people's lives quite a bit.
Having the decency to give people some privacy at work, allowing them to make (reasonable) personal use of the company IT infrastructure, and abiding by the golden rule is the right thing to do. I, for one, have no interest in working for a company that does otherwise. Your company sounds like exactly the sort of overbearing corporate hellhole that I try to avoid.
P.S. Keep your personal files on an external disk, and lock that thing up when you leave the office.
Depends. I didn't RTFA but did it happen to mention the average age of apple employees? Maybe Apple hires younger, more motivated employees than it does stodgy middle-aged types? A younger workforce could explain the lower salaries...
Eh. I think in general, women engineers (as a group) are better than male engineers. Pretend 5% of the population (either gender) is predisposed to be good at engineering. Given cultural factors that encourage men to go into sciences, 10% of men might go into engineering, meaning half of them are NOT meant for the work. OTOH, if only 2.5% of women go into engineering, they're probably biased towards the whip smart + motivated side of things.
I don't think either men or women are better at engineering, but there are just plain fewer women in these fields and they tend to be very competent, in my experience. More wheat; less chaff.
This really boils down to having a distrust of authority, period. Media, government, politicians, teachers, cops, etc. Hard to teach to little kids, but darn easy for a teenager to pick up.
The problem I face as a parent (or will face when my kid is older) is how I teach my child to be skeptical of all authority figures while also respecting MY authority and staying out of trouble. Or rather, to be skeptical but not necessarily *act* on that skepticism. How do I teach my kid not to trust DARE or abstinence-only propaganda, but to abstain from smoking pot and having anal sex until he's old enough that it won't take over his life? How do I teach him that the police aren't to be trusted unconditionally, but that you should tend to do what they say? Or that, yeah, your HS teacher is full of crap, but you have to do the work anyway?
Acting on skepticism requires a certain amount of maturity that kids, teenagers--and lets face it, adults----often lack. I was a smart kid, but I didn't have any real perspective/empathy until I was well into my 20's. My skepticism wasn't tempered by a sense that I could *possibly* be wrong on an issue. On occasions I acted on what, in retrospect, was completely batshit crazy logic.
I'm sure it will succeed. With a name like T. Boone Pickens, how could it possibly fail? Seriously, who named this guy? Because that's EXACTLY what I'd name my son if I wanted him to grow up to be an oil magnate. Or to ride a nuke down to earth and start WWIII.
I agree that it's cheaper, but only if you drink a fair amount of beer and if you're not factoring in your time. It's a couple of hours of work to brew a 5 gallon batch, which with what I value my time, is a fair amount of money. Factor in the 10 square feet of floor area in my house taken up by all my brewing crap, at say $15/sf/yr. And the time spent reading about brewing. And worrying about every batch like it's my child. And the electricity used by your kegerator.
On the other hand, it's damn hard to find a better beer than what you make at home. Perhaps other homebrewers have had the experience of drinking almost solely their own beer for a year or two, then going somewhere and having a beer you used to think was the bee's knees only to find it a flavorless, depressing swill. Or going somewhere and drinking a beer that you used to find good-but-overwhelming (Dogfish Head 90 minute?) and finding it a whole lot more easy to drink.
"Stefan Thurner, a physicist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his collaborators looked at the overall efficiency of virtually every government on the globe, as measured by United Nations and World Bank indicators taking into account factors such as literacy, life expectancy and wealth"
The big problem with this is that it's assuming the government has significant control over literacy, wealth and life expectancy. Literacy and life expectancy are strongly related to wealth, and wealth is related to a bunch of geographical factors. I didn't read the study, but did it compare a country only to its neighbors/other countries on its continent? Because it should have. Also, is there any way to separate causation and correlation here?
Perhaps Weak Country -> Weak Government -> Political Mayhem -> Large Committees of People With Divergent Opinions.
P.S. Be suspicious of any political/social science research done by physicists.
You're on to something. I mean, come on, how can you possibly expect them NOT to shoot down a satellite? I can count on three toes the number of things more awesome than shooting down a satellite with a missile.
1) Blowing up an asteroid with a nuke
2) Landing a space ship on the sun
3) Downing a UFO before it has the chance to report back to its home world
Number 4 is CLEARLY shooting down a satellite with a missile.
This is essentially perfect if what you want is to do light computing, and the compromises seem acceptable. So you rip your DVDs and don't load it down with media that've already gotten bored with. Big deal. It's not a desktop replacement like a macbook pro, but I'd carry something like this pretty much everywhere while the MBP mostly stays at home or goes with me when I travel/need to do a presentation. A mac this light would be very tempting if I had a little more disposable income. I walk 3 or 4 miles a day, every day, and so I'm not real keen on schlepping a big laptop with me to work and back...but something dumbed down like an Asus Eee doesn't quite cut it, although for 1/5 the price it's awfully tempting. I suspect many city-dwelling non-car commuters will feel the same, although maybe not so many that this is more than a niche product.
1) Straighten out the economy. Oil prices, housing slump, and the mess that is the Federal Banking Commission. 2) Scale back the size of the Federal Government and lower taxes accordingly. 3) Get a kick-ass foreign relations team into the embassies and capitals to repair our good name.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, pass the bong. I want some of that shit.
No, the problem is that the fan base is insane and expectations are through the roof. If two blackberries in a million are faulty, it'll never make it onto slashdot. The two account execs who own them just don't care about the product enough to bitch. If two iPhones in a million show up with some hairline cracks on them, all of a sudden it's on Consumerist and MacRumors and every other tech website.
Sorry, but all products have flaws. You're delusional if you think that even 1% of companies are able to find all the bugs in their product before it makes it out the door. Even my f-ing Honda has had recalls.
I think the goal is consumer satisfaction, and Apple has consistently proven themselves capable in delivering a product that people love. The problem is that people love it so very, very much that they're willing to spend 30 hours posting about perceived slowness in the interface or perceived slowness in download speeds. Ultimately, no one is producing a product like the iPhone that surpasses the iPhone's user experience, and that counts for a lot.
A lot of architects I know do a whole lot of their work on macs, whether in windows emulation for CAD or natively in sketchup.
...and even if they give you permission, they may remotely disable your latte if it violates your coffee shop's TOS.
Right, which is why none of the great medical devices of the last 100 years have come from the United States. Oh, wait...
Government agencies like the DOT does testing all the time. Ever pass a sign on the highway saying you're going to be on experimental pavement for the next 500'?
So NASCAR isn't objective and competition? I realize many people think NASCAR is all about going left a few hundred times and then drinking a beer, but they _do_ race on road courses. Watching them at Watkins Glenn is like watching elephants dance. Any professional level auto racing is also much, much more physically demanding than a lot of more conventional sports.
Yes, however an equally effective strategy would be to tell all the speculators that trolls have been visiting House and Senate members in private meetings and have promised to lead everyone to a vast supply of light sweet crude, but only on the condition that first we invest $50B in green energy. I mean, if we're living in a fantasy world, we might as well turn it to our advantage...
Correct. Lots of people are allowed onto your property if it's necessary to complete their duties. This includes people like game wardens, bounty hunters, police, surveyors, etc. Read about Invitees and Licensees on Wikipedia.
Google doesn't have any such justification to be on your land. I dunno about the specifics regarding private roads, since I suspect they fall into some kind of gray area...
Is that a joke? Yeah, innovation (and design) is what separates Apple from Microsoft, but is there something more important than innovation and design in the computer industry?
I don't think that's entirely fair. Many people want what the iPhone offers. There's nothing wrong with wanting something beautiful or with wanting something that exists almost purely to please the user, sometimes at the expense of raw power or functionality. There's something to the fact that iPhone users both slurp more data off the network and are more satisfied with their smart phones than others. I work with a bunch of non-techies but when I hand them the iPhone to check out, they're usually able to figure it out how to make a call or browse the web in under a minute. Less if they're already mac users that know the safari icon. That's pretty impressive given that its OS operates completely differently from any other cell phone. As is the owner's manual which is about 1/10 the size of the one on my old Nokia with 1/10 the features
Apple design is usually about what isn't offered, and that's like a slap in the face to many geeks who measure THEIR penises by feature count. Figuring out what NOT to include is probably more difficult than any other component of design. There's a tradeoff between complexity and usability. Look at Google's home page. Look at modernist architecture. Look at most top notch products, really.
There are plenty of options for people looking for something more tailored to email or text messaging. However, I'd be interest to know if you can name a product that comes closer to the mythical device convergence we've been hearing about for ten years.
Yeah, it ain't perfect, but it's not like anyone else is making the perfect device, either.
Most cameras rollover every 10K images and start re-using the old file names. Totally annoying.
Pittsburgh doesn't belong on this list _at all_. Yes, there's tons of shit in the ground, and the air sucks by US standards, but c'mon. Anyone who has traveled to _any_ third world city knows there's no comparison in terms of livability. Pittsburgh is paradise by those standards. Even compared to most european cities, where everyone is buzzing around on catalyst-free scooters and 2-stroke engines, Pittsburgh air is tasty.
Having the decency to give people some privacy at work, allowing them to make (reasonable) personal use of the company IT infrastructure, and abiding by the golden rule is the right thing to do. I, for one, have no interest in working for a company that does otherwise. Your company sounds like exactly the sort of overbearing corporate hellhole that I try to avoid.
P.S. Keep your personal files on an external disk, and lock that thing up when you leave the office.
Depends. I didn't RTFA but did it happen to mention the average age of apple employees? Maybe Apple hires younger, more motivated employees than it does stodgy middle-aged types? A younger workforce could explain the lower salaries...
I don't think either men or women are better at engineering, but there are just plain fewer women in these fields and they tend to be very competent, in my experience. More wheat; less chaff.
This really boils down to having a distrust of authority, period. Media, government, politicians, teachers, cops, etc. Hard to teach to little kids, but darn easy for a teenager to pick up.
The problem I face as a parent (or will face when my kid is older) is how I teach my child to be skeptical of all authority figures while also respecting MY authority and staying out of trouble. Or rather, to be skeptical but not necessarily *act* on that skepticism. How do I teach my kid not to trust DARE or abstinence-only propaganda, but to abstain from smoking pot and having anal sex until he's old enough that it won't take over his life? How do I teach him that the police aren't to be trusted unconditionally, but that you should tend to do what they say? Or that, yeah, your HS teacher is full of crap, but you have to do the work anyway?
Acting on skepticism requires a certain amount of maturity that kids, teenagers--and lets face it, adults----often lack. I was a smart kid, but I didn't have any real perspective/empathy until I was well into my 20's. My skepticism wasn't tempered by a sense that I could *possibly* be wrong on an issue. On occasions I acted on what, in retrospect, was completely batshit crazy logic.
I'm sure it will succeed. With a name like T. Boone Pickens, how could it possibly fail? Seriously, who named this guy? Because that's EXACTLY what I'd name my son if I wanted him to grow up to be an oil magnate. Or to ride a nuke down to earth and start WWIII.
On the other hand, it's damn hard to find a better beer than what you make at home. Perhaps other homebrewers have had the experience of drinking almost solely their own beer for a year or two, then going somewhere and having a beer you used to think was the bee's knees only to find it a flavorless, depressing swill. Or going somewhere and drinking a beer that you used to find good-but-overwhelming (Dogfish Head 90 minute?) and finding it a whole lot more easy to drink.
"Stefan Thurner, a physicist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his collaborators looked at the overall efficiency of virtually every government on the globe, as measured by United Nations and World Bank indicators taking into account factors such as literacy, life expectancy and wealth"
The big problem with this is that it's assuming the government has significant control over literacy, wealth and life expectancy. Literacy and life expectancy are strongly related to wealth, and wealth is related to a bunch of geographical factors. I didn't read the study, but did it compare a country only to its neighbors/other countries on its continent? Because it should have. Also, is there any way to separate causation and correlation here?
Perhaps Weak Country -> Weak Government -> Political Mayhem -> Large Committees of People With Divergent Opinions.
P.S. Be suspicious of any political/social science research done by physicists.
You haven't been here very long, I guess.
You're on to something. I mean, come on, how can you possibly expect them NOT to shoot down a satellite? I can count on three toes the number of things more awesome than shooting down a satellite with a missile.
1) Blowing up an asteroid with a nuke 2) Landing a space ship on the sun 3) Downing a UFO before it has the chance to report back to its home world
Number 4 is CLEARLY shooting down a satellite with a missile.
This is essentially perfect if what you want is to do light computing, and the compromises seem acceptable. So you rip your DVDs and don't load it down with media that've already gotten bored with. Big deal. It's not a desktop replacement like a macbook pro, but I'd carry something like this pretty much everywhere while the MBP mostly stays at home or goes with me when I travel/need to do a presentation. A mac this light would be very tempting if I had a little more disposable income. I walk 3 or 4 miles a day, every day, and so I'm not real keen on schlepping a big laptop with me to work and back...but something dumbed down like an Asus Eee doesn't quite cut it, although for 1/5 the price it's awfully tempting. I suspect many city-dwelling non-car commuters will feel the same, although maybe not so many that this is more than a niche product.
1) Straighten out the economy. Oil prices, housing slump, and the mess that is the Federal Banking Commission. 2) Scale back the size of the Federal Government and lower taxes accordingly. 3) Get a kick-ass foreign relations team into the embassies and capitals to repair our good name.
You forgot step 0) Find magic lamp.
I'm going to loose the grammar police on you.