Apple does put a lot of research into their stores, it's why there aren't more than there are. They could have just carpet-bombed, putting one on every corner, but they don't do that. Each store is massively profitable for its square footage because they spend a huge amount of money researching and designing each one on an individual basis. It was certainly a gamble, initially, but now they make so much money from the stores they can easily afford to do this sort of high quality planning for future ones.
People have to drive a bit to get to one, in many places, but the thing of it is people are willing to drive there no matter how far away it is. Heck, a lot of their "flagship" stores have become tourist attractions.
I think it's a terrible idea to put them so close together. It may actually drive more traffic to Apple Stores.
Think about it, you're a regular customer who doesn't know much about computers, but you heard that (through Microsoft marketing) that the Microsoft Store is the best place to go and really learn about how to use the computer, and they'll tell you which one to buy which is good because you don't have a clue. You arrive at the parking lot, and you look around. As you approach the Microsoft Store, you look across the way and see a a big crowded Apple Store.
"Oh, that's one of those Apple places," you think to yourself. "While I'm here, maybe I should go look and see why everyone is talking about those. I'm really going to buy a Windows PC, so I'll go to the Microsoft Store after I see what the deal is with those Apples."
So you wander over to the Apple Store, and rather than being jumped by desperately lonely salespeople, you see that the store is crowded, really crowded, and everyone looks happy and casually interacting with the products. You wait around a bit, a bit in shock, and then stumble in a haze over to a computer station, or perhaps an iPhone or iPod, or one of those iPad things you've seen on TV in the New York Times ads. Almost right away, you find yourself looking around at the other customers, and how they don't seem scared of the products they're looking at, they're just messing around, doing whatever they want. You've always been wary of technology displays, and the infinite levels of choice, and no understanding of what it all means, but suddenly you feel like it's okay to play around too.
Suddenly, another customer starts a conversation with you. That's never happened to you before in any store, and you begin to ask them questions, and before you know it, another customer is selling you on the Mac or iOS device you're playing with, telling you their experiences, and what they've done with theirs.
On your way back to the car, your credit card recently charged and a box under your arm, you remember you were supposed to go into the Microsoft Store. But you don't feel guilty. The nice enthusiastic kid with the Apple shirt told you you can still do all your Microsoft Offices and Words and showed you how easy it is to move all your pictures and files to your new Mac, and if you have any questions, you can always come back and talk to somebody called a Genius who will help you out some more. You don't care about games, you have a console for that, or don't game at all. Most of what you do is in a web browser anyway.
I expect that happens a heck of a lot more than the reverse.
Apple has done a remarkable job becoming establishment while maintaining their outsider credibility. It really comes about, I think, from their hippy origins and starting out in a garage. Heck, they flew a pirate flag outside their headquarters for the longest time (they may still, I don't know). When you've been the underdog your entire time in business, and have an anti-establishment culture within the company, that sort of reputation sticks, even when you've got the biggest market cap and everybody and their mother has an iPod.
And, let's face it, Apple has amazing marketing, and a real focus on cool things to do with your devices, not the devices themselves. When you go into an Apple Store, each area is set up for "solutions" not just a long row of computers as you find in most stores. You go to the music area, it's all about music. You go to the video area, it's all about video. You look at their TV ads, and the emphasis is never on specs, it's about usability and what you can do. It makes it a lot less nerdy, and a lot more approachable, to the average consumer. Apple is a huge company, but they have the personality of a scrappy little company that's cool to associate with. People want to Think Different even when everybody else is too. It's remarkable how Apple has gotten the best of both worlds and no doubt business schools will be talking about it for a long time.
We'll see how well it lasts without Steve Jobs, I guess, but I think they'll keep it going. Steve Jobs set up "Apple University" to indoctrinate employees in the culture, and certainly the team he assembled under him during his tenure as CEO are true believers.
Apple may not have a living room console, but they've got the handheld market. Heck, Nintendo's downfall is being blamed on iOS games (and to an extent, other mobile phone games).
That's for computer sales, worldwide. When you look at US stats, it's definitely double digits, and compared to other computer manufacturers individually, instead of against all Windows combined, they have a very respectable share, especially in the laptop market and non-business computing. They're also pretty much the only computer manufacturer that is growing their market share, and rather dramatically, compared to nearly all of their competitors losing ground.
For Apple's other markets, music players, phones, and tablets, they are clearly quite dominant.
You may be confused, this isn't the 90s Apple anymore.
It's actually a good thing if we don't find life on Mars, so we can avoid an Andromeda Strain type of situation, or War of the Worlds in reverse, when we try to set up a colony on Mars. Sterile planets are better for terraforming. If we find life on Europa, we can happily let them keep living there. We don't want a moon base there anyway.
I think he honestly just enjoys the technology and enjoys talking to other people who enjoy technology. He doesn't need the attention and neither does the iPhone, it'll sell just great whether he's there or not. But he's going to have fun and what's wrong with that?
Apple's #1 in customer satisfaction, so I guess they're all just buying it to be cool, right? Couldn't have anything to do with people actually liking the things.
Tim Cook believes that inventory is evil, and for good reason. You have to pay money to keep those warehouses going, and meanwhile the stuff inside is losing value anyway. Ever since he started managing Apple's supply chains, and no doubt this will continue through his tenure as CEO, Apple runs a lean ship. Still, I think when the numbers come out, it'll be clear Apple sold a lot of phones, above and beyond any other phone's rollout stockpile, and this was not just some marketing gimmick of reduced supplies to hype the demand. Apple did stockpile more phones than the last time around, yet they still sold out like crazy. I'm sure if there was any possible way for Apple to make more of them faster, they would be doing just that.
The more money and energy we make now from the resources we have, the more money and energy we'll have to spend to get resources later, and invent new ones. Human living standards do not decrease, ever, and we've burned through more different kinds of resources than you apparently think, with newer better stuff coming to replace them each time without a hitch.
I'm not opposed to environmentalism, but sustainability? No thanks, sustainability means stagnation. We should always be striving for more and more growth, more and more resources consumed, because we inevitably innovate our way out of each shortage we create. With that innovation, we get a higher standard of living, better stuff, and greater understanding. We can and should become more efficient, but never to conserve what we have left, only to maximize what we get as we burn through it as fast as possible.
What global warming proponents want to do is throw overboard the guy who put holes in the boat and patch up only the small holes, rather than bail out the boat and patch all the holes starting with the biggest ones first.
If the match is already lit, you don't put out the forest fire by stopping somebody from lighting more matches. If we agree the forest is on fire, and not everyone agrees but that's another issue, you fight the forest fire, not the match lighters.
We need to develop technologies that counter-act the current cause of global warming, and cool the planet down again (if/as needed). Ceasing CO2 output completely, right now, will not return the atmosphere to a pre-human state, not in any of our lifetimes, or even our childrens' lifetimes.
Unfortunately, all the research money and political power is in a war with the CO2 instead of the actual problem.
That's right, it's cyclical, and has been forever. We also should not ignore the big fusion furnace at the center of our system, either, though many do.
There's three issues at play in the global warming debate.
1) Is the Earth warming up? 2) What is causing the Earth to warm, if 1 is true? 3) What do we do about it?
Evidence for #1 is tentative, as methods of measuring are highly variable in their effectiveness, and we haven't really been taking good scientific readings for a long enough period of time. Still, in the very long run, we're coming up from an ice age and temperatures will probably rise by a couple degrees over hundreds of years. It is certainly not the massive disaster it's being made out to be, where North America is underwater in 20 years and all crops die out causing an unprecedented famine.
#2 is largely irrelevant, from a social and governmental point of view. Even if humans have caused global warming, and ceased whatever activity that caused it right now today, 100%, the atmosphere doesn't immediately revert to how it was 10-15,000 years ago when humans starting seriously altering the environment. If it's an external cause, such as the big nuclear explosions going off 1 AU away from us that's also causing Martian ice caps to melt, knowing that cause doesn't help us solve the problem.
So, we're stuck with #3, what do we do about it? Understanding the extent of the problem more might be nice, but I think the point to be made here is that we don't have full command or knowledge over our environment, as much as we'd like to think. The solution, therefore, cannot be to cripple our economy and shut down our most productive industries, nor can it be to denigrate our best scientists. Unfortunately, this entire thing has become political, rather than a true scientific and industrial issue. Rather than getting rid of jobs and playing the blame game, we need to focus on proactive solutions. We can't put the industrial genie back in the bottle, but we can make it work for us. We should explore terraforming technologies, call it geoengineering if you like. We should become true masters of our environment, capable of understanding fully how it works, and how we can alter it. The reality is we have hundreds of years before global warming is going to be a problem, or global cooling, if we go that way. But, while this issue is in the forefront of so much discussion and research, we can make real strides so when the time does come, we can shape the Earth in whatever way we'd like, and other planets too, and do so without crippling our economies.
Remember, the actual science behind global warming is very slow and gradual, we can all take a breath. The false sense of urgency is currently being used for bad in the political arena, but we can use it for good if we really tried.
This would be excellent, and put the moderation value right there on the main page for all to see. That way when there's a big Redundant or Troll on there, people know to just skip it.
It is partly based on your activity level on the site. Too active, you're disqualified for being too invested. Too inactive, you're disqualified for not being invested enough. I consistently get moderator points when I read the site about every day, and comment only a few times. When I haven't been reading the site consistently for long enough, or when I spend a lot of time posting, I get no points.
The idea is to get people moderating who are involved enough in the site to know how to moderate well. People who don't have time to spend 5 or 15 points in three whole days probably aren't active enough on the site.
If you disagree and get modded down into oblivion, you're doing it wrong. Analyze your position, and learn how to express it better in a more well-thought out way. When I moderate, I frequently mod up views I disagree with if they are well argued and spur conversation.
For every time I've been modded down for an unpopular view, I usually get modded up twice or more not long after for the same post. At the very least, it tends to get stabilized at 2. Moderators are doing a good job counteracting any bias.
It's not just karma, it's your participation level, as well. People become moderators if they are fairly average in their reading and posting habits. I've gotten 15 mod points to spend several days in a row where I posted just a couple times, and no points at all when I've posted more frequently, or not at all for a while. The theory is that those who are rabid slashdot commenters, posting many times a day, are maybe less objective.
Clearly this is some James Bond villain's satellite weapon firing electrons at the Earth's crust to cause an earthquake. That's why the electrons show up in the atmosphere first, then the earthquake happens after. I think we need to investigate large construction company CEOs, one of them clearly has a doomsday machine.
People who care enough to read live commentary on the event already know where to find that. I don't understand why we're getting this non-article telling us exactly nothing, when waiting an hour means you could have actual information to report.
Obscurity has its uses, because with enough determination anybody can get any key regardless of how strong of a lock you use, or how mathematically sound your encryption is. Either they beat it out of you, as you say, or they do some social engineering, or they get a job working for you where they'll have access.
Obscure, therefore, who it is that you need to beat up, talk to, or work for, and obscure what it is that you're locking up so nobody knows to go looking. It's perhaps your only defense against a determined enough opponent, but ultimately this strategy can be beat as well. The only real security is in keeping your measures, whatever they are, far more costly to break than the value of what it is you're locking up. Overkill, yes, but it will keep you perfectly secure.
Since that's rather expensive, instead make yourself a higher-hanging fruit than all the others. Use more security than anyone else, but as cheap as possible otherwise. People are lazy, and will go after the easiest targets first, and there's only so much time in the day so they'll never get around to you. Call it security in being the fastest of the herd.
Unless there is strong incentive to not reveal knowledge of a backdoor if you find it, such as the desire to exploit it yourself. With open source, you're still trusting the people who really spent the time to look at and understand the code. How many of those people are there? How many of them do you trust absolutely?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple does put a lot of research into their stores, it's why there aren't more than there are. They could have just carpet-bombed, putting one on every corner, but they don't do that. Each store is massively profitable for its square footage because they spend a huge amount of money researching and designing each one on an individual basis. It was certainly a gamble, initially, but now they make so much money from the stores they can easily afford to do this sort of high quality planning for future ones.
People have to drive a bit to get to one, in many places, but the thing of it is people are willing to drive there no matter how far away it is. Heck, a lot of their "flagship" stores have become tourist attractions.
I think it's a terrible idea to put them so close together. It may actually drive more traffic to Apple Stores.
Think about it, you're a regular customer who doesn't know much about computers, but you heard that (through Microsoft marketing) that the Microsoft Store is the best place to go and really learn about how to use the computer, and they'll tell you which one to buy which is good because you don't have a clue. You arrive at the parking lot, and you look around. As you approach the Microsoft Store, you look across the way and see a a big crowded Apple Store.
"Oh, that's one of those Apple places," you think to yourself. "While I'm here, maybe I should go look and see why everyone is talking about those. I'm really going to buy a Windows PC, so I'll go to the Microsoft Store after I see what the deal is with those Apples."
So you wander over to the Apple Store, and rather than being jumped by desperately lonely salespeople, you see that the store is crowded, really crowded, and everyone looks happy and casually interacting with the products. You wait around a bit, a bit in shock, and then stumble in a haze over to a computer station, or perhaps an iPhone or iPod, or one of those iPad things you've seen on TV in the New York Times ads. Almost right away, you find yourself looking around at the other customers, and how they don't seem scared of the products they're looking at, they're just messing around, doing whatever they want. You've always been wary of technology displays, and the infinite levels of choice, and no understanding of what it all means, but suddenly you feel like it's okay to play around too.
Suddenly, another customer starts a conversation with you. That's never happened to you before in any store, and you begin to ask them questions, and before you know it, another customer is selling you on the Mac or iOS device you're playing with, telling you their experiences, and what they've done with theirs.
On your way back to the car, your credit card recently charged and a box under your arm, you remember you were supposed to go into the Microsoft Store. But you don't feel guilty. The nice enthusiastic kid with the Apple shirt told you you can still do all your Microsoft Offices and Words and showed you how easy it is to move all your pictures and files to your new Mac, and if you have any questions, you can always come back and talk to somebody called a Genius who will help you out some more. You don't care about games, you have a console for that, or don't game at all. Most of what you do is in a web browser anyway.
I expect that happens a heck of a lot more than the reverse.
Apple has done a remarkable job becoming establishment while maintaining their outsider credibility. It really comes about, I think, from their hippy origins and starting out in a garage. Heck, they flew a pirate flag outside their headquarters for the longest time (they may still, I don't know). When you've been the underdog your entire time in business, and have an anti-establishment culture within the company, that sort of reputation sticks, even when you've got the biggest market cap and everybody and their mother has an iPod.
And, let's face it, Apple has amazing marketing, and a real focus on cool things to do with your devices, not the devices themselves. When you go into an Apple Store, each area is set up for "solutions" not just a long row of computers as you find in most stores. You go to the music area, it's all about music. You go to the video area, it's all about video. You look at their TV ads, and the emphasis is never on specs, it's about usability and what you can do. It makes it a lot less nerdy, and a lot more approachable, to the average consumer. Apple is a huge company, but they have the personality of a scrappy little company that's cool to associate with. People want to Think Different even when everybody else is too. It's remarkable how Apple has gotten the best of both worlds and no doubt business schools will be talking about it for a long time.
We'll see how well it lasts without Steve Jobs, I guess, but I think they'll keep it going. Steve Jobs set up "Apple University" to indoctrinate employees in the culture, and certainly the team he assembled under him during his tenure as CEO are true believers.
Apple may not have a living room console, but they've got the handheld market. Heck, Nintendo's downfall is being blamed on iOS games (and to an extent, other mobile phone games).
That's for computer sales, worldwide. When you look at US stats, it's definitely double digits, and compared to other computer manufacturers individually, instead of against all Windows combined, they have a very respectable share, especially in the laptop market and non-business computing. They're also pretty much the only computer manufacturer that is growing their market share, and rather dramatically, compared to nearly all of their competitors losing ground.
For Apple's other markets, music players, phones, and tablets, they are clearly quite dominant.
You may be confused, this isn't the 90s Apple anymore.
It's actually a good thing if we don't find life on Mars, so we can avoid an Andromeda Strain type of situation, or War of the Worlds in reverse, when we try to set up a colony on Mars. Sterile planets are better for terraforming. If we find life on Europa, we can happily let them keep living there. We don't want a moon base there anyway.
I think he honestly just enjoys the technology and enjoys talking to other people who enjoy technology. He doesn't need the attention and neither does the iPhone, it'll sell just great whether he's there or not. But he's going to have fun and what's wrong with that?
NASA does have the will. They just don't have the sorts of guaranteed funding to carry out what they want to do.
Apple's #1 in customer satisfaction, so I guess they're all just buying it to be cool, right? Couldn't have anything to do with people actually liking the things.
Tim Cook believes that inventory is evil, and for good reason. You have to pay money to keep those warehouses going, and meanwhile the stuff inside is losing value anyway. Ever since he started managing Apple's supply chains, and no doubt this will continue through his tenure as CEO, Apple runs a lean ship. Still, I think when the numbers come out, it'll be clear Apple sold a lot of phones, above and beyond any other phone's rollout stockpile, and this was not just some marketing gimmick of reduced supplies to hype the demand. Apple did stockpile more phones than the last time around, yet they still sold out like crazy. I'm sure if there was any possible way for Apple to make more of them faster, they would be doing just that.
You make it sound like switching over to nuclear power now would be like swallowing bitter medicine.
It's less bitter than you think.
The more money and energy we make now from the resources we have, the more money and energy we'll have to spend to get resources later, and invent new ones. Human living standards do not decrease, ever, and we've burned through more different kinds of resources than you apparently think, with newer better stuff coming to replace them each time without a hitch.
I'm not opposed to environmentalism, but sustainability? No thanks, sustainability means stagnation. We should always be striving for more and more growth, more and more resources consumed, because we inevitably innovate our way out of each shortage we create. With that innovation, we get a higher standard of living, better stuff, and greater understanding. We can and should become more efficient, but never to conserve what we have left, only to maximize what we get as we burn through it as fast as possible.
What global warming proponents want to do is throw overboard the guy who put holes in the boat and patch up only the small holes, rather than bail out the boat and patch all the holes starting with the biggest ones first.
If the match is already lit, you don't put out the forest fire by stopping somebody from lighting more matches. If we agree the forest is on fire, and not everyone agrees but that's another issue, you fight the forest fire, not the match lighters.
We need to develop technologies that counter-act the current cause of global warming, and cool the planet down again (if/as needed). Ceasing CO2 output completely, right now, will not return the atmosphere to a pre-human state, not in any of our lifetimes, or even our childrens' lifetimes.
Unfortunately, all the research money and political power is in a war with the CO2 instead of the actual problem.
That's right, it's cyclical, and has been forever. We also should not ignore the big fusion furnace at the center of our system, either, though many do.
There's three issues at play in the global warming debate.
1) Is the Earth warming up?
2) What is causing the Earth to warm, if 1 is true?
3) What do we do about it?
Evidence for #1 is tentative, as methods of measuring are highly variable in their effectiveness, and we haven't really been taking good scientific readings for a long enough period of time. Still, in the very long run, we're coming up from an ice age and temperatures will probably rise by a couple degrees over hundreds of years. It is certainly not the massive disaster it's being made out to be, where North America is underwater in 20 years and all crops die out causing an unprecedented famine.
#2 is largely irrelevant, from a social and governmental point of view. Even if humans have caused global warming, and ceased whatever activity that caused it right now today, 100%, the atmosphere doesn't immediately revert to how it was 10-15,000 years ago when humans starting seriously altering the environment. If it's an external cause, such as the big nuclear explosions going off 1 AU away from us that's also causing Martian ice caps to melt, knowing that cause doesn't help us solve the problem.
So, we're stuck with #3, what do we do about it? Understanding the extent of the problem more might be nice, but I think the point to be made here is that we don't have full command or knowledge over our environment, as much as we'd like to think. The solution, therefore, cannot be to cripple our economy and shut down our most productive industries, nor can it be to denigrate our best scientists. Unfortunately, this entire thing has become political, rather than a true scientific and industrial issue. Rather than getting rid of jobs and playing the blame game, we need to focus on proactive solutions. We can't put the industrial genie back in the bottle, but we can make it work for us. We should explore terraforming technologies, call it geoengineering if you like. We should become true masters of our environment, capable of understanding fully how it works, and how we can alter it. The reality is we have hundreds of years before global warming is going to be a problem, or global cooling, if we go that way. But, while this issue is in the forefront of so much discussion and research, we can make real strides so when the time does come, we can shape the Earth in whatever way we'd like, and other planets too, and do so without crippling our economies.
Remember, the actual science behind global warming is very slow and gradual, we can all take a breath. The false sense of urgency is currently being used for bad in the political arena, but we can use it for good if we really tried.
This would be excellent, and put the moderation value right there on the main page for all to see. That way when there's a big Redundant or Troll on there, people know to just skip it.
It is partly based on your activity level on the site. Too active, you're disqualified for being too invested. Too inactive, you're disqualified for not being invested enough. I consistently get moderator points when I read the site about every day, and comment only a few times. When I haven't been reading the site consistently for long enough, or when I spend a lot of time posting, I get no points.
The idea is to get people moderating who are involved enough in the site to know how to moderate well. People who don't have time to spend 5 or 15 points in three whole days probably aren't active enough on the site.
If you disagree and get modded down into oblivion, you're doing it wrong. Analyze your position, and learn how to express it better in a more well-thought out way. When I moderate, I frequently mod up views I disagree with if they are well argued and spur conversation.
For every time I've been modded down for an unpopular view, I usually get modded up twice or more not long after for the same post. At the very least, it tends to get stabilized at 2. Moderators are doing a good job counteracting any bias.
It's not just karma, it's your participation level, as well. People become moderators if they are fairly average in their reading and posting habits. I've gotten 15 mod points to spend several days in a row where I posted just a couple times, and no points at all when I've posted more frequently, or not at all for a while. The theory is that those who are rabid slashdot commenters, posting many times a day, are maybe less objective.
Clearly this is some James Bond villain's satellite weapon firing electrons at the Earth's crust to cause an earthquake. That's why the electrons show up in the atmosphere first, then the earthquake happens after. I think we need to investigate large construction company CEOs, one of them clearly has a doomsday machine.
People who care enough to read live commentary on the event already know where to find that. I don't understand why we're getting this non-article telling us exactly nothing, when waiting an hour means you could have actual information to report.
Obscurity has its uses, because with enough determination anybody can get any key regardless of how strong of a lock you use, or how mathematically sound your encryption is. Either they beat it out of you, as you say, or they do some social engineering, or they get a job working for you where they'll have access.
Obscure, therefore, who it is that you need to beat up, talk to, or work for, and obscure what it is that you're locking up so nobody knows to go looking. It's perhaps your only defense against a determined enough opponent, but ultimately this strategy can be beat as well. The only real security is in keeping your measures, whatever they are, far more costly to break than the value of what it is you're locking up. Overkill, yes, but it will keep you perfectly secure.
Since that's rather expensive, instead make yourself a higher-hanging fruit than all the others. Use more security than anyone else, but as cheap as possible otherwise. People are lazy, and will go after the easiest targets first, and there's only so much time in the day so they'll never get around to you. Call it security in being the fastest of the herd.
Who actually reads anything more than TFS?
Unless there is strong incentive to not reveal knowledge of a backdoor if you find it, such as the desire to exploit it yourself. With open source, you're still trusting the people who really spent the time to look at and understand the code. How many of those people are there? How many of them do you trust absolutely?