I think you are looking at this all wrong. Glass half-empty sort of view. Despite the restrictions that China places on Google, the availability of a powerful search tool like that is going to pay huge dividends to the Chinese people in their ability to find information relevant to them and educate and empower themselves.
Yes, there will be restrictions, and yes that will silence some important information, but the greater good is the wealth of information that will be readily available to an individual that would otherwise not be.
Do you honestly think google doesnt have a big ole log of everything accessed by every IP?
No, I do not think that at all. Nor did I say it. What I said was that they are not the only company with vast and very accurate information of that sort, so they have little advantage in this respect.
Information is King and Google is King of Search. But Google is not King of Information.
By which I mean that yes, they have formidable analytic capability, but it is centered around publically accessible information. Since Google's foundation is providing that capability to the public, Apple can simply use Google's own search capability to mine the internet, or they can leverage a competitors search capability, or both. They can hire people (as they already do) to assess their particular market.
Google is not the answer to everything--42 is, if you're keeping track--and I think in time people will see that with clarity. Right now everyone is just in awe of the valuation that everyone's awe has created.
In other words, people's fascination with the company is the thing that is really fascinating them, and that will likely spin out of control until people realize, "Woah, my feet aren't even on the ground," and then everything falls down.
Or not.
Either way, I think your conclusion is not right. Google's does not have unique consumer information that cannot be obtained through other avenues by Apple or another competitor.
The tremendous differentiation of dogs is due to selective breeding by humans. If you released them all into the wild, quite a few of the exotic breeds would die off straight away. Short lifespans and frequent interbreeding would give you a whole pile of funny looking mutts at first, but in a hundred years or so, most of the feral dogs running around in temperate climbs would be brown short haired dogs about knee high. Or so I think based on observation of other indigenous species like rabbits and squirrels, etc. All that differentiation has only been possible because we sustain it with careful "pure breeding" and the evolved animals are not subject to natural selection processes like a Chihuahua vs. Bobcat or even the simple natural selection process of seasonal temperature variation (in many cases).
Would be an interesting experiment to see pan out, but I like my dog so I'm not kicking him out into the wild with an RFID:).
One thing to keep in mind is that we are not only peaking on price point for petroleum extraction and production, but demand is increasing exponentially. China is coming online as a major industrial nation now.
The changes should be gradual and better for the environment. Fuel prices will rise pretty consistently over the next 10 years, and as the production cost for fossil fuel derivatives increases, other options will become more viable and niche alternative fuel markets will emerge and begin to grow.
Even now, I see cars running around on bio-diesel which I had not seen at all 5 years ago. Solar is becoming more efficient and the electric companies will want to get on board with that rather than lose revenue to emerging players that will set up a self-sufficient home that is entirely off the grid.
Then there's pebble reactors which can supply enough electricity to meet our needs and which greenies will suddenly become less opposed to when the crunch is really on and they still want to travel around in the luxury of their own vehicle.
Anyway. There are many alternatives in the wings and most are actually in use by niche market consumers. It is just that the cost efficiency is not currently equivalent or better than oil right now...but they will be better soon. And soon is sooner than most think because oil demand is increasing at a far greater rate now than it was 10 years ago (due to industrialization in various nations).
I work at a M$ shop. Training dollars are always the first part of the budget that is reclaimed during the course of the year when people are looking for money. Different companies have different cultures, but that is how it has been at my company since I began 3 years ago. My experience has been that money is only spent on training when a significant project is on the horizon and it has a significant impact on the general ledger. If it is a crisis, they will contract--leaving very little in-house knowledge after the contract is done. If it is a longer term thing, they will not bother with training because it is too difficult to see dollars spent this year on people as having a return on investment. If the return would come after a couple years, that is just too far out to bother. Management will care about this years incentivized goals only. Another factor is turnover. If the company has normal or higher turnover, then management is less inclined to train people that will just leave.
Of course, the ironic thing is that investing very little in your peoples' personal growth is one of the key reasons that they do go,:-).
Well, that's the reality. If I can offer you the best advice in the world, it is: take personal responsibility for everything that has to do with your career growth. Everything. Training, pensions, promotions, increased responsibility. The days of companies rewarding loyalty are all but gone in corporate America. (There are some places that hold to the long-term view, yes. Go find one of those places, but be aware that they are few.) In this day, the only person thinking long-term about you is you and maybe your loved ones, if they are not completely overloaded by trying to work out their own goals.
Don't expect anything from your company. Go get the training you want, and then make your company aware of how valuable you are. If they do not ante up and treat you right, go elsewhere. What I have seen in the industry over the past decade is that 90% of the respect you get from a job is usually established when you are hired into the company. Not a lot of leeway unless the company is small or otherwise very volatile and they desperately need bigger skills from someone and you can demonstrate that you have them. That's a hard fight, though. People want to keep you exactly where you are relative to them. It's just how most people operate. Not many are mature enough to empower you to rise to as much responsibility and knowledge as you are capable. Not many at all. Usually they'll only empower you if they are terrified of the alternative.
If your company does anything for you, it's either required by law or a pleasant surprise. That's they way to approach it. Otherwise you'll be Waiting for Godot and you'll only get where they want you to get rather than where you want to get.
Agreed. Online interactive environment simulators pwn just about anything. It seems more likely to me that the issue is related to a bug in the new area. MC and Alterac have been running at high volumes for many months with minimal issues. Something to keep in mind when considering Blizzard's track record.
People always go ballistic at the slightest interruption. Often the symptoms are suspiciously like withdrawal symptoms in an addict. No surprise there.
Another thing to consider is that WoW has been around for a little over a year. It is the highest player volume online game ever as far as I know. Even higher than the Asian games like Lineage that have a couple million subscribers. In addition, MMOGs are a relatively new market, whereas the financial sector has been around for a very long time and it has been online for considerably longer.
I quit WoW several months ago and am quite happy that I did, but not playing gives me the clarity to see that they are not doing so badly as far as server stability, and that this is a momentary bug that will be addressed. It is not conclusive proof that Blizzard is a Monopoly of Network Dumbasses.
Jobs choice to invest in great people has everything to do with the success of his companies. You have it completely backwards. The greatest mind in the world is for nothing if strong leadership does not empower it.
But on the same token, Jobs is nothing without those great people as well. No man is an island.
Don't worry. When oil runs out, if fission is the most cost effective alternative, all the resistance to clean fission plants (pebble reactors) will magically disappear. When most people suddenly cannot afford to heat their home or operate their vehicle, they will change their tune quite rapidly.
Because the people with knee-jerk objections to pebble reactors are ignorant, and ignorant people are driven by fear. Seeing heating and fuel costs quadruple will put the fear in them, and when the counter argument from the government is "we can create environmentally safe pebble reactors and address this issue", the ignorant will go from "Hell no" to, "Oh, well I guess that is OK," to "Praise, Jesus!".
If College really wanted to prepare people for the real world. They would create an environment that mimics the real one. Curriculums would be designed around economic realities in addition to academic topics. Kids would be given virtual salaries that mirror their chosen career path. They'd be given the potential for an accelerated 4 year career growth path. They would be asked to make choices about where they live and what kind of virtual assets they buy: apartment, single family home, duplex? They'd be given the ability to make choices in virtual neighborhoods with good and bad neighbors and good and bad school systems. During their college term, the stork would bring them virtual children to deal with economically, and if they want they can play a mock stock markete or get themselves into a pile of debt. In addition to that, they would be learning the real technical crap they need for their chosen career path. Did you choose Software Engineering? Ok, you are building a real application then, so your job performance, virtual advancement, etc. will depend on it. You had better deliver a quality product at the end of each college year or you fail that segment of the curriculum.
Each year, every single student would be graded on their progress according to these metrics: net assets, job performance, interpersonal skills, and things like political currency (How well do they know what is going on in the real world?). If they did very poorly, they would fail and have to continue until they addressed the situation.
Will this ever happen? No way. Because educating our children is not the priority in this society. Prolonging their adolescence and controlling the large youth population is the priority.
I did read the article. The credit card thing was a useful example of a contract that says a few sentences in 12 pages. The same is true across every industry. College certainly does not prepare people for most of what they will deal with the day they step into the real world.
This is not a new thing. People are not mind-bendingly stupid. College students are simply efficient. The majority of them are on a parent provided ride (no, not all of course; some are working hard to be there for that piece of paper) through wonderland where they are not so concerned with:
Balancing a checkbook.
Putting food on the table.
Saving for retirement.
Providing for a family.
Paying a mortgage.
Financing their own children's education.
I just think the article was misguided. "OMGZ college students do not know the things that people in the real world do!" Not very insightful or surprising when you consider that they are living in a pretty sheltered world and when pretty much everyone goes out and tries to hold out a job, they get a pretty rude awakening.
The real point they are slowly creeping toward is that schooling is pretty much a failure as far as teaching people what they really need to know to survive beyond college. It is not really designed to educate. It is designed to control youth and prolong adolescence. It does that very well as the results of the study show.
If you took everyone in college and just sent them out into the world to find jobs straight away, most of them would learn what they needed to know right quick and they would do all right. I can tell you I dropped out of high school, got an equivalency, then a Master's, and when I went out into the real world I felt a tremendous sense of lost time. Nothing I had learned in all those years to get the stupid piece of paper that would make people take me seriously turned out to have much importance.
I went and educated myself about saving, investing, real estate, and communicating with people in a business environment. Did it matter that I read The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird, or that I could integrate and differentiate equations six ways from Sunday, or that I could write an algorithm that applies the Ford-Fulkerson method to solve network flow problems?
No. It did not matter at all. School teaches very little that is really important to being successful in the real world. If you train for a specialized field and are lucky enough to land a job in it and lucky enough to have picked what really is your life passion right off the bat--OK. I think such people are not the norm, so I say in general college fails to prepare. It's not stupidity on the part of the students. It's simple efficiency. They learn what they need to learn to get through it. They do what little is asked, and then they go enjoy themselves.
Well, perhaps that is not all bad. If our young adults really are so lacking, it might force reform and simplification of these agreements. If you get a large enough portion of the population sucked into terrible contracts because they are dumb as posts, it is very bad for the economy and legislation is likely.
I've read every "agreement" related to money that I've ever made. Credit card agreements are long and complicated. Do I understand them? Yes. Do I remember all the details in the agreement right now? No. Does it matter? No. I use the card to purchase and I reimburse them at the end of the month or over time with interest. If I fail to pay, the card is frozen and I owe. That's the agreement. But that agreement turns into 12 pages of very fine print.
That's a big WTF moment for me.
I find myself wondering if this "study" would have had the exact same result 10 or 20 years ago and if it did, would it be more attributable to the average intelligence of those tested or rather to the increasing complexity of legalese in virtually everything.
When agreements you have to sign have 20 term definitions at the beginning of the document, you know there's a problem. WTF? Is there no commonly understood word for what the document wants to say? And then there's the other factor of, "Well if I want to use a damn credit card, I have to sign this agreement. And I could sign a different one, but they are all exactly the same. So do I even need to read it? Read one agreement for a credit card. If you do not agree, you might as well agree not to use any credit card anywhere. But if you really do need a credit card, you pretty much just have to agree. You can invest your time in reading every contract to the letter, but the returns are diminishing and it all starts to look like the same old shit.
You figure, 30 people I know have this credit card and they seem to get by all right. I guess it will be all right for me. That's just common sense, and it's pretty valid, too. If there were serious issues with a particular agreement, you would hear about it for certain, and if you did not, well the issue is probably infrequent enough and buried deep enough in the nebulous agreement terms that only a very few people (even the really smart ones) will notice it in advance.
Things are so complicated because a small percentage of the population does not operate on good faith. Therefore most of us our saddled with legal agreements that do their utmost to either screw us over, or protect the interest of the service provided in every conceivable way (which requires a devil's contract worth--more than a person can read in a lifetime--of text). Everyone knows how this works. You make a simple agreement with your customers. A couple of your customers are a really bad sort and they make your life a living Hell by ignoring good faith and exploiting ambiguities in your simple agreement. After you surive that--if you do--you modify the agreement with very detailed, very technical, hopefully unambiguous text, so no one does that to you again. Then that process repeats, and agreements grow and grow into a jungle of verbage.
Because there are some bad apples out there and the disciplinarian for them is our body of law which is even more nebulous, contorted, confusing, and technical than the broken agreement that caused the issue. Enter the lawyers.
I think the idea is that, if M$ entered the space, Apple would license FairPlay to undermine M$'s efforts, thus flooding the market with cheap devices but even more firmly establishing the huge revenue stream that is iTunes. If that happened, M$ could license FairPlay (Apple might as well, since there will be no shortage of companies to churn out the devices M$ would put on the market). Other companies would be willing to sell well below Apple's margins and that would cut into revenue as Apple lowers prices to remain competitive. Then M$ gets the thousand monkeys working on the DRM and media company side of things and starts eroding the content portion of Apple's market.
I don't have a Stanford MBA,:-), but if M$ wanted to get into Apple's market they probably could. It does not seem like a smart move to me, though because M$ would have to dig pretty deep into their pockets to do it and they can better spend the same money in other areas.
Anyway, I think TFA is basically right in that Jobs is just "Go ahead and try" poking fun at fears about losing their prominence in the market, but it is not because they are they have the only license to FairPlay. They can still hold most of the revenue in the market if they do license to other companies. It would be fun to see that play out. I fondly recall the days of PowerComputer and their ilk,:-).
If your IQ is still 190, the chances are you aren't going to fit in...
If his IQ was 190, you would think he could work out a way to stop working for The Man. Perhaps Mr. Calculates-Route-Tables-In-His-Head and Has-Captain-Amazing-Sales-Skills could try real estate. Or if he prefers another flavor: the stock market.
Both of those options will allow him to leverage extreme intelligence as well as mathematical and sales aptitude. Both will get him out from the oppressive man's foot quite rapidly. With a 190 IQ, he should be able to come up with a pile of other good alternatives, too.
Honest truth here. I'm a white bastard. And you know what? I've had the exact same types of conversations The Great Oppressed Black Genius described with people when I identify an issue. It's not a racial thing. It's an "I have a brain and that is intimidating to people that want to remain necessary and keep their job" thing.
*sigh* 190 IQ multi-linguil person works as a system admin where apparently people discriminate against him. I just don't buy the whole post. I think it's BS. None of the pieces fit together. One of our VPs is a black man and he is sharp as a whip. The company offered him a CTO position and he turned it down because he had a better offer on the table from elsewhere. He was really good and everyone respected him and though he was very bright, I bet he was not even close to an IQ of 190.
QoS is not a failed model. You're just looking at the wrong factor. In the area of latency, it is important. Specifically, for VOIP which will be a big market. Also for gaming which is not a particularly large market now, but is growing rapidly (and will increasingly include telephony).
Of course, VOIP will probably become such a dominant factor that in the end you will not be able to differentiate services on latency, but in the near term, it's a market.
Wasn't so long ago that people were touting the RISC design of PowerPC as a big power saver. Fewer instructions, less heat. The first iMac was the one of the quietest computers I had ever owned; I recall the Apple IIe being similar. I guess that changed, but I do not know when.
The Cell processor is an IBM creation. Several are going into the Playstation 3, so will this require a fan? Seems IBM is still building cooler chips and Intel is not the only one that cares about it.
Don't really have the details. Just wondering what happened. The context of TFA was that IBM just could not "do it" for Apple in the cool laptop department, so they jumped ship.
A powerful storm is a small danger. Rapid climate change is a very large one. I do not hold to the opinion that our recovery systems are "pretty good" though. New Orleans was declared a national disaster and will cost billions of dollars. A storm did that and a storm is a pretty minor event on a global scale.
If we do see rapid climate change in our lifetime, consider the impact of a 50% reduction in food production capacity in the northern hemisphere. Crop failures from a 5 to 10 degree Centigrade average annual temperature drop would be very serious. And the cooling would be reinforced in successive seasons.
In combination with that, heating costs would go through the roof and the resulting economic pressure would be enormous. Political pressure centered on the Middle East would be dangerously high. A 5 year or longer depression is a distinct possibility and some Slashdot readers may have actually lived through the last one. They can tell you that alone is a serious thing, but people did not also have to deal rapid climate change during the last depression.
The real problem is that, as you said, people do not see the problem and think that everything is fine. But if you look at current events, it takes very little to cause a national disaster. A storm hits a city. A couple planes crash into a building.
We're still feeling shockwaves from 9/11. How many buildings are there in the United States? Two go down with minimal casualties. The economy takes a serious hit. Legislation is passed to erode civil liberties. People wander around in fear for several years. That is not effective recovery; it is panic and shock. Have we built ourselves a glass nation?
What I was referring to in my post is simpler than that. It is the real danger that the climate could change rapidly (in a year) and the impact of that would be undeniably severe. "I cannot afford to heat my home and I cannot afford to feed my children." You do not need that many people to be in that situation to have a national crisis. If suddenly 20% of the population were in that situation, you have a very serious problem.
I am not much for alarmism. I am a conservative investor. So when I see a risk that geological records have shown is a valid one, I think: hedge my bets. It may not happen in our lifetime, but it will happen, and there are many environmental indicators that show a definite enough pattern that it is worth addressing. When you see dark clouds stacked high up into the sky, you go out and put the top up on the convertible. When you see a 30% drop in the efficacy of a major global heat transfer mechanism (ocean currents), you think it might be wise to do what you can to protect your self, your family, and your nation.
If you're not terribly worried about losing a stockpile of your own germs that may keep your immune system finely tuned, http://www.grandtec.com/vik.htm keyboards are really excellent for keeping a clean environment. You can just wipe them down with a cloth every couple of days.
This was a great find for me, because cleaning a standard keyboard with all the crevices under and around the keys is a total pain and would take me 15 minutes to do with a little vacuum and a damp cloth. If you happen to have allergies or maybe have an immune system deficiency, these simplify the process of protecting yourself quite a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there will be restrictions, and yes that will silence some important information, but the greater good is the wealth of information that will be readily available to an individual that would otherwise not be.
I prefer the glass 3 quarters full.
When in Rome... If you want to do business in China, you have to do business China's way.
By which I mean that yes, they have formidable analytic capability, but it is centered around publically accessible information. Since Google's foundation is providing that capability to the public, Apple can simply use Google's own search capability to mine the internet, or they can leverage a competitors search capability, or both. They can hire people (as they already do) to assess their particular market.
Google is not the answer to everything--42 is, if you're keeping track--and I think in time people will see that with clarity. Right now everyone is just in awe of the valuation that everyone's awe has created.
In other words, people's fascination with the company is the thing that is really fascinating them, and that will likely spin out of control until people realize, "Woah, my feet aren't even on the ground," and then everything falls down.
Or not.
Either way, I think your conclusion is not right. Google's does not have unique consumer information that cannot be obtained through other avenues by Apple or another competitor.
Would be an interesting experiment to see pan out, but I like my dog so I'm not kicking him out into the wild with an RFID :).
The changes should be gradual and better for the environment. Fuel prices will rise pretty consistently over the next 10 years, and as the production cost for fossil fuel derivatives increases, other options will become more viable and niche alternative fuel markets will emerge and begin to grow.
Even now, I see cars running around on bio-diesel which I had not seen at all 5 years ago. Solar is becoming more efficient and the electric companies will want to get on board with that rather than lose revenue to emerging players that will set up a self-sufficient home that is entirely off the grid.
Then there's pebble reactors which can supply enough electricity to meet our needs and which greenies will suddenly become less opposed to when the crunch is really on and they still want to travel around in the luxury of their own vehicle.
Anyway. There are many alternatives in the wings and most are actually in use by niche market consumers. It is just that the cost efficiency is not currently equivalent or better than oil right now...but they will be better soon. And soon is sooner than most think because oil demand is increasing at a far greater rate now than it was 10 years ago (due to industrialization in various nations).
I, for one, welcome our tall blonde petroleum free overladies! (There's always water-based.)
Of course, the ironic thing is that investing very little in your peoples' personal growth is one of the key reasons that they do go, :-).
Well, that's the reality. If I can offer you the best advice in the world, it is: take personal responsibility for everything that has to do with your career growth. Everything. Training, pensions, promotions, increased responsibility. The days of companies rewarding loyalty are all but gone in corporate America. (There are some places that hold to the long-term view, yes. Go find one of those places, but be aware that they are few.) In this day, the only person thinking long-term about you is you and maybe your loved ones, if they are not completely overloaded by trying to work out their own goals.
Don't expect anything from your company. Go get the training you want, and then make your company aware of how valuable you are. If they do not ante up and treat you right, go elsewhere. What I have seen in the industry over the past decade is that 90% of the respect you get from a job is usually established when you are hired into the company. Not a lot of leeway unless the company is small or otherwise very volatile and they desperately need bigger skills from someone and you can demonstrate that you have them. That's a hard fight, though. People want to keep you exactly where you are relative to them. It's just how most people operate. Not many are mature enough to empower you to rise to as much responsibility and knowledge as you are capable. Not many at all. Usually they'll only empower you if they are terrified of the alternative.
If your company does anything for you, it's either required by law or a pleasant surprise. That's they way to approach it. Otherwise you'll be Waiting for Godot and you'll only get where they want you to get rather than where you want to get.
Yeh, but Europe is irrelevant. (That is a _joke_.)
Sorry, what parent means is that catsuits and stylish glasses are preferred.
Gnomeregan (GMR) Uldaman (ULD)
People always go ballistic at the slightest interruption. Often the symptoms are suspiciously like withdrawal symptoms in an addict. No surprise there.
Another thing to consider is that WoW has been around for a little over a year. It is the highest player volume online game ever as far as I know. Even higher than the Asian games like Lineage that have a couple million subscribers. In addition, MMOGs are a relatively new market, whereas the financial sector has been around for a very long time and it has been online for considerably longer.
I quit WoW several months ago and am quite happy that I did, but not playing gives me the clarity to see that they are not doing so badly as far as server stability, and that this is a momentary bug that will be addressed. It is not conclusive proof that Blizzard is a Monopoly of Network Dumbasses.
But on the same token, Jobs is nothing without those great people as well. No man is an island.
Because the people with knee-jerk objections to pebble reactors are ignorant, and ignorant people are driven by fear. Seeing heating and fuel costs quadruple will put the fear in them, and when the counter argument from the government is "we can create environmentally safe pebble reactors and address this issue", the ignorant will go from "Hell no" to, "Oh, well I guess that is OK," to "Praise, Jesus!".
If College really wanted to prepare people for the real world. They would create an environment that mimics the real one. Curriculums would be designed around economic realities in addition to academic topics. Kids would be given virtual salaries that mirror their chosen career path. They'd be given the potential for an accelerated 4 year career growth path. They would be asked to make choices about where they live and what kind of virtual assets they buy: apartment, single family home, duplex? They'd be given the ability to make choices in virtual neighborhoods with good and bad neighbors and good and bad school systems. During their college term, the stork would bring them virtual children to deal with economically, and if they want they can play a mock stock markete or get themselves into a pile of debt. In addition to that, they would be learning the real technical crap they need for their chosen career path. Did you choose Software Engineering? Ok, you are building a real application then, so your job performance, virtual advancement, etc. will depend on it. You had better deliver a quality product at the end of each college year or you fail that segment of the curriculum.
Each year, every single student would be graded on their progress according to these metrics: net assets, job performance, interpersonal skills, and things like political currency (How well do they know what is going on in the real world?). If they did very poorly, they would fail and have to continue until they addressed the situation.
Will this ever happen? No way. Because educating our children is not the priority in this society. Prolonging their adolescence and controlling the large youth population is the priority.
This is not a new thing. People are not mind-bendingly stupid. College students are simply efficient. The majority of them are on a parent provided ride (no, not all of course; some are working hard to be there for that piece of paper) through wonderland where they are not so concerned with:
I just think the article was misguided. "OMGZ college students do not know the things that people in the real world do!" Not very insightful or surprising when you consider that they are living in a pretty sheltered world and when pretty much everyone goes out and tries to hold out a job, they get a pretty rude awakening.
The real point they are slowly creeping toward is that schooling is pretty much a failure as far as teaching people what they really need to know to survive beyond college. It is not really designed to educate. It is designed to control youth and prolong adolescence. It does that very well as the results of the study show.
If you took everyone in college and just sent them out into the world to find jobs straight away, most of them would learn what they needed to know right quick and they would do all right. I can tell you I dropped out of high school, got an equivalency, then a Master's, and when I went out into the real world I felt a tremendous sense of lost time. Nothing I had learned in all those years to get the stupid piece of paper that would make people take me seriously turned out to have much importance.
I went and educated myself about saving, investing, real estate, and communicating with people in a business environment. Did it matter that I read The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird, or that I could integrate and differentiate equations six ways from Sunday, or that I could write an algorithm that applies the Ford-Fulkerson method to solve network flow problems?
No. It did not matter at all. School teaches very little that is really important to being successful in the real world. If you train for a specialized field and are lucky enough to land a job in it and lucky enough to have picked what really is your life passion right off the bat--OK. I think such people are not the norm, so I say in general college fails to prepare. It's not stupidity on the part of the students. It's simple efficiency. They learn what they need to learn to get through it. They do what little is asked, and then they go enjoy themselves.
Simple.
I've read every "agreement" related to money that I've ever made. Credit card agreements are long and complicated. Do I understand them? Yes. Do I remember all the details in the agreement right now? No. Does it matter? No. I use the card to purchase and I reimburse them at the end of the month or over time with interest. If I fail to pay, the card is frozen and I owe. That's the agreement. But that agreement turns into 12 pages of very fine print.
That's a big WTF moment for me.
I find myself wondering if this "study" would have had the exact same result 10 or 20 years ago and if it did, would it be more attributable to the average intelligence of those tested or rather to the increasing complexity of legalese in virtually everything.
When agreements you have to sign have 20 term definitions at the beginning of the document, you know there's a problem. WTF? Is there no commonly understood word for what the document wants to say? And then there's the other factor of, "Well if I want to use a damn credit card, I have to sign this agreement. And I could sign a different one, but they are all exactly the same. So do I even need to read it? Read one agreement for a credit card. If you do not agree, you might as well agree not to use any credit card anywhere. But if you really do need a credit card, you pretty much just have to agree. You can invest your time in reading every contract to the letter, but the returns are diminishing and it all starts to look like the same old shit.
You figure, 30 people I know have this credit card and they seem to get by all right. I guess it will be all right for me. That's just common sense, and it's pretty valid, too. If there were serious issues with a particular agreement, you would hear about it for certain, and if you did not, well the issue is probably infrequent enough and buried deep enough in the nebulous agreement terms that only a very few people (even the really smart ones) will notice it in advance.
Things are so complicated because a small percentage of the population does not operate on good faith. Therefore most of us our saddled with legal agreements that do their utmost to either screw us over, or protect the interest of the service provided in every conceivable way (which requires a devil's contract worth--more than a person can read in a lifetime--of text). Everyone knows how this works. You make a simple agreement with your customers. A couple of your customers are a really bad sort and they make your life a living Hell by ignoring good faith and exploiting ambiguities in your simple agreement. After you surive that--if you do--you modify the agreement with very detailed, very technical, hopefully unambiguous text, so no one does that to you again. Then that process repeats, and agreements grow and grow into a jungle of verbage.
Because there are some bad apples out there and the disciplinarian for them is our body of law which is even more nebulous, contorted, confusing, and technical than the broken agreement that caused the issue. Enter the lawyers.
I don't have a Stanford MBA, :-), but if M$ wanted to get into Apple's market they probably could. It does not seem like a smart move to me, though because M$ would have to dig pretty deep into their pockets to do it and they can better spend the same money in other areas.
Anyway, I think TFA is basically right in that Jobs is just "Go ahead and try" poking fun at fears about losing their prominence in the market, but it is not because they are they have the only license to FairPlay. They can still hold most of the revenue in the market if they do license to other companies. It would be fun to see that play out. I fondly recall the days of PowerComputer and their ilk, :-).
According to Darwin, it must matter, or we wouldn't have different colors, :-).
Both of those options will allow him to leverage extreme intelligence as well as mathematical and sales aptitude. Both will get him out from the oppressive man's foot quite rapidly. With a 190 IQ, he should be able to come up with a pile of other good alternatives, too.
Honest truth here. I'm a white bastard. And you know what? I've had the exact same types of conversations The Great Oppressed Black Genius described with people when I identify an issue. It's not a racial thing. It's an "I have a brain and that is intimidating to people that want to remain necessary and keep their job" thing.
*sigh* 190 IQ multi-linguil person works as a system admin where apparently people discriminate against him. I just don't buy the whole post. I think it's BS. None of the pieces fit together. One of our VPs is a black man and he is sharp as a whip. The company offered him a CTO position and he turned it down because he had a better offer on the table from elsewhere. He was really good and everyone respected him and though he was very bright, I bet he was not even close to an IQ of 190.
Well, anyway...
Of course, VOIP will probably become such a dominant factor that in the end you will not be able to differentiate services on latency, but in the near term, it's a market.
The Cell processor is an IBM creation. Several are going into the Playstation 3, so will this require a fan? Seems IBM is still building cooler chips and Intel is not the only one that cares about it.
Don't really have the details. Just wondering what happened. The context of TFA was that IBM just could not "do it" for Apple in the cool laptop department, so they jumped ship.
If we do see rapid climate change in our lifetime, consider the impact of a 50% reduction in food production capacity in the northern hemisphere. Crop failures from a 5 to 10 degree Centigrade average annual temperature drop would be very serious. And the cooling would be reinforced in successive seasons.
In combination with that, heating costs would go through the roof and the resulting economic pressure would be enormous. Political pressure centered on the Middle East would be dangerously high. A 5 year or longer depression is a distinct possibility and some Slashdot readers may have actually lived through the last one. They can tell you that alone is a serious thing, but people did not also have to deal rapid climate change during the last depression.
The real problem is that, as you said, people do not see the problem and think that everything is fine. But if you look at current events, it takes very little to cause a national disaster. A storm hits a city. A couple planes crash into a building.
We're still feeling shockwaves from 9/11. How many buildings are there in the United States? Two go down with minimal casualties. The economy takes a serious hit. Legislation is passed to erode civil liberties. People wander around in fear for several years. That is not effective recovery; it is panic and shock. Have we built ourselves a glass nation?
What I was referring to in my post is simpler than that. It is the real danger that the climate could change rapidly (in a year) and the impact of that would be undeniably severe. "I cannot afford to heat my home and I cannot afford to feed my children." You do not need that many people to be in that situation to have a national crisis. If suddenly 20% of the population were in that situation, you have a very serious problem.
I am not much for alarmism. I am a conservative investor. So when I see a risk that geological records have shown is a valid one, I think: hedge my bets. It may not happen in our lifetime, but it will happen, and there are many environmental indicators that show a definite enough pattern that it is worth addressing. When you see dark clouds stacked high up into the sky, you go out and put the top up on the convertible. When you see a 30% drop in the efficacy of a major global heat transfer mechanism (ocean currents), you think it might be wise to do what you can to protect your self, your family, and your nation.
This was a great find for me, because cleaning a standard keyboard with all the crevices under and around the keys is a total pain and would take me 15 minutes to do with a little vacuum and a damp cloth. If you happen to have allergies or maybe have an immune system deficiency, these simplify the process of protecting yourself quite a bit.