Of course, if you want to go to the grocery store in that Tesla, you better choose between your groceries or a passenger, because both aren't going to fit. Yes, I've been in plenty of Tesla roadsters, and "spacious" is the last thing you think of (of course, it's just an electric Lotus, so why would it be spacious?). The "trunk" barely holds a pair of computer laptop bags, let alone groceries for a family of four for 4 or 5 days.
.
And of course, that Smith's truck can haul about 5 Tesla Roadsters for that 100 miles; the converse cannot be said.
Smiths makes real, work vehicles. Tesla makes fancy roadsters for eco-yuppies to show off their millions. If you want to make real vehicles for real world conditions, Smiths would be the better source to turn to. After all, you don't partner with Lamborghini or Ferrari when designing/creating mundane, non-exotic travel.
And yes, I know about the supposed "Type S" coming... A year and a half out, and $50K and up. Again, not really applicable now is it?
You know something about farming and rice in Haiti? Really? Ever been there? There was NO FREAKING RICE TO BEGIN WITH. Subsistence level, because 90% is confiscated by the local mayors and governors for their own use. What little is "for sale" was predominantly imported through Port-au-Prince or Dessalines, and the former was wiped out by the earthquake.
If people were boxes that needed to be stored in a warehouse, then the math would be solid. But that's simply not the case. Furthermore, even if such a state is possible and sustainable, that in no way means that it's desirable. I don't want to live in Texas with the population density throughout the entire state as dense as NYC. That sounds horrific.
It's about 5500 people per square mile. Really not all that dense. It's not the wide open spaces, but it's not downtown-Manhattan or Tokyo or Shanghai dense.
And note: this is a WORST CASE, of putting everybody and ALL resources inside the USA. The rest of the WORLD - including the oceans - are completely empty. Want to spread out? Hey, we have Canada to use - that would cut the density down to almost nothing...
Another thing that is completely neglected is future population growth. The reason people like you think that overpopulation is a myth is because you're only thinking within the timeframe of your own life. It's that old, "won't be a problem until after I'm dead" shrug off of a problem. Some people actually care about future generations, even if they won't be around to enjoy their company.
I live in Shanghai most of the time (here right now, actually). It's population is already slowing, as are the populations of India and most of Southeast Asia (3 of the 4 most populous nations are here: China, India, and Indonesia). As populations gain wealth and comfort - move upscale - they start to cut back on their own numbers inherently. You no longer need 17 children to work the farm, or 4 kids to care for you when you're sick.
And finally, the environmental impact isn't taken into account at all. Waste management, air pollution, water pollution, and the preservation of natural ecosystems are all neglected.
Sewage shouldn't be a problem, and with proper management neither is air nor water pollution. As for the ecosystems, we keep every square meter of parks and national forests in the US, and the REST OF THE WORLD is untouched by man, left completely natural. I don't think you can get more "low footprint" than that! Less than 2% of the world used for everything.
Quality of life is important.
Sure, you still have all those parks and forests in the US to enjoy - anything that's public or private recreation now, you still have. And of course, the REST OF THE WORLD can be a nature preserve for enjoyment.
Actually, I think more automated farming is what's required. It increases harvest ratios and productivity of the soil. There's a reason the US grows so much more per acre than most other nations...
We don't have a distribution or a resource problem, we have a starvation problem.
Distribution results in starvation. There is plenty of food in the world, it just is not distributed properly.
When I've gone on humanitarian aid trips to Haiti, Sudan, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and a half-dozen other shitholes around the world, the issue hasn't been one of getting supplies and food IN to the country, and getting it there in sufficient quantities. The issue has been making sure it goes to those who need it, rather than those who desire it.
For most of the starving world, food is a weapon used by the local thug/"political leader" to wield against the people and enforce their will. Most of the time, the ONLY reason food and medicine was properly dispensed and rationed and CONSUMED was because of those firearms carried by the soldiers around us.
You want to know how to solve the starvation problem? Use an assault rifle in the hands of a trained soldier and kill the scum who choose to enforce starvation for their own sociopathic, twisted pleasure or gain. A bullet to the head of a few dozen scum would quickly change the way most of those thugs operate and at least food supplies would get through.
Yes, that's not politically correct, and I guess many would call it uncivilized. But most of those thugs and cretins care not for Western reasoning or compassion. They get the food, drink, money and women as they want, without repercussion.
Why should the want to give up power and control - to make the West feel happy? Heck no! They WANT pictures of starving orphans, of emaciated women on the TV because they know - they KNOW - that we in West will spend billions of dollars to send food and drugs and equipment to "solve the problem". And they can sit back and take it for their own pleasure and use and power.
You either write the people off - ignore the suffering - or you simply execute the bastards in charge. There is no other solution.
It's not starvation - there is plenty of food. It's distribution. From thugs stealing food shipments to countries erecting insane barriers to the import/export of food. Distribution - not production - is the problem.
Please see the parent's post, the post I responded to, in particular his claim that Steve jobs has not interest in shaping the Internet into a "consume, consume, consume" form. Then see the dictionary entry for the word "sarcasm".
The overpopulation myth. Bottom line - we could provide for every single person living on this planet with just the resources inside the US. Never mind the rest of the world. We're a LONG way from overpopulation... We have a distribution - not resource - problem to solve.
This one. It's a full featured tablet, lacking 3G but has WIFI, removable SD Card memory, USB ports, HDMI output, a decent screen (same pixel density as the iPad), pretty good battery life (7-8 hours of music and book reading), Android 2.1 and Android Market access. And you can get them for well under $200; a friend here in Shanghai just picked one up - with a leather folding cover/case that includes an integrated keyboard - for $140.
Look around. You can find pretty powerful Android 2.1 tablets for cheap. A friend here in Shanghai just bought one - with a USB keyboard in the cover - for 960 RMB, about $140. I've had one for several months now, and it's been a great tablet - does everything I could want a tablet to do, and is very affordable. It's only a matter of time before a bigger brand starts importing these into the EU and the US.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking WP7 - it's super-easy to use. I was dispelling the myth that WinMo 6.5 was terrible. It was - and is - actually decently functional, and with a good UI on top of it, it's a phenomenal option.
.
If I was an MS VP, I'd keep offering WinMo 6.5, but with a skinned version of SPB Mobile Shell on top of it. The skin would make it look more like WP7 (colors, flat tiles, etc) but you would retain 100% of the monster functionality of WinMo 6.5. And this would become WP7 Pro - targeted squarely at enterprise/heavy-duty users.
WinMo 6.5 has a tremendous amount of functionality and capability - way beyond iOS, Android, Symbian, WP7, any of the others. It's just got an ugly, jumbled interface as stock. Microsoft should just buy a great, slick UI that already exists and ship THAT as stock. It would really give them a one-two punch in the smartphone market: WP7 for the consumer oriented iOS/Android segment, and WP7 Pro for the RIM/Symbian business oriented segment.
Re:iOS is woefully behind on ease of use?
on
Motorola Sues Apple
·
· Score: 1
Having widgets I can drop on my home screen is great. I love having everything I need at a glance on my WinMo phone (HTC Touch Pro2) and my Android tablet (X5A with Android 2.1). Calendar, appointments, alarms, messaging status, weather - all on a single screen without the need to click on little icons to bring up dedicated displays for each.
.
Not having to actually USE the phone to access those things (because they're the default, customized to my needs home screen) is the ultimate ease-of-use.
Same here. Be it iTunes, or iPads, or iPhones, or whatever comes from Apple, they all serve as lock-in tools. Take iOS for instance. The only major mobile OS that isn't cross-hardware-platform. It's based on OSX, which originated on POSIX, so they should have been able to offer a POSIX version and may have been very profitable. The reason they don't is because it doesn't fit their larger business plan, which is to force users to use Apple for everything. As long as they have phone and media monopolies, they'll do this. We'll see them start to play nicely as soon as they lose their monopoly (as we're beginning to see with iOS). This is the biggest reason I avoid Apple.
Next is their despicable behavior, like what they did in the Google Voice debacle. I'll consider Apple when they start completing fairly and introduce some ethics into their business. They could start by offering their software on other platforms in the cases where it would be profitable.
On the other hand, I love my HTC Touch Pro2 with WinMo 6.5, and SPB Mobile Shell. A truly great UI, extensible, clean, fast to navigate. Eye-candy if you want it, totally simple to customize, much more intuitive and easy to use than the "3 screens of little, identical icons" that the iPhone pushes.
.
Hardware is rock-solid, too. It has a real keyboard, screen with resolution that's ONLY eclipsed by the iPhone 4 (and just barely at that), and tons of other hardware features lacking in many phones (microSD card and removable battery, for example) And let's not forget CDMA and GSM chipsets so I can use it around the world (GSM with various SIM cards) and on the reliable, fast Verizon network in the US.
Slick enough it was fun to do a demo from at last year's CES, when I demo'd for a bunch of Apple guys a new speaker system, streaming Bluetooth from my phone while showing a PowerPoint presentation, and letting them use it as a WIFI hotspot so they could actually get some bandwidth for their iPhones... Oh, and we had a Skype conference going from the phone at the same time.
Same thing, here. I'm in my apartment in Shanghai, reading this and the two source articles, no problem at all. I think this is probably a little overblown in coverage, it's not as restrictive as most think. In fact, Netflix and Hulu are more restrictive (including have a blocked list of US proxies) than most of China, and that includes the China Telecom DSL I'm using right now.
One company has a couple of products which provide the majority of its profits. And these products are at risk as applications transition to the cloud. Most other lines break even or lose money.
Yep, you just described Apple perfectly. The iPhone and the iPod Touch are where they make the lion's share of their money. And with apps moving to the cloud, functionality like running Flash and supporting dynamically loaded libraries and client-side scripting becomes critical. Of course, those are the very things Apple refuses to allow you to do...
The other company sells high profit margin products as fast as they can produce them and is constantly finding ways to make moribund and imaginary product areas fabulously profitable.
Yes, that would be Microsoft. Their profit margin is about double that of Apple, indicative of selling high profit margin products.
Thanks for proving my point - Apple's stock price is in a media-hype-driven bubble.
You talked about records. What record did then-candidate Obama have that you could use to judge his "suitability" on civil liberties? He talked a lot, but what actual record did the man have - what actions or votes did he take that were different from those of Senator McCain during the period Obama was a senator?
Apple market cap today: 260B
Microsoft market cap today: 212B
Yes, bubbles driven by media exposure pumps up market caps way beyond reality.
Company 1: more revenue, more profit in absolute dollars, higher profit margin, complete dominance in its markets which are core to the functioning of modern society, pays a decent dividend. Diversified beyond the "cult of personality" of being all about a specific individual/founder.
Company 2: less revenue, less profit in absolute dollars, lower profit margin, losing market share in its markets (which are not core to society), pays no dividend. Still a cult of personality that relies upon the ideas/guidance of a single man with health issues.
Yeah, company 2 only has a higher market cap if it's in a bubble. And bubble is what Apple's stock price certainly is.
Maybe because Apple loves to charge twice what those other companies charge for the same basic product? Apple's got the margin, and their fanbois love to crow about it...
Slashdot Mirror
And of course, that Smith's truck can haul about 5 Tesla Roadsters for that 100 miles; the converse cannot be said.
Smiths makes real, work vehicles. Tesla makes fancy roadsters for eco-yuppies to show off their millions. If you want to make real vehicles for real world conditions, Smiths would be the better source to turn to. After all, you don't partner with Lamborghini or Ferrari when designing/creating mundane, non-exotic travel.
And yes, I know about the supposed "Type S" coming... A year and a half out, and $50K and up. Again, not really applicable now is it?
You know something about farming and rice in Haiti? Really? Ever been there? There was NO FREAKING RICE TO BEGIN WITH. Subsistence level, because 90% is confiscated by the local mayors and governors for their own use. What little is "for sale" was predominantly imported through Port-au-Prince or Dessalines, and the former was wiped out by the earthquake.
If people were boxes that needed to be stored in a warehouse, then the math would be solid. But that's simply not the case. Furthermore, even if such a state is possible and sustainable, that in no way means that it's desirable. I don't want to live in Texas with the population density throughout the entire state as dense as NYC. That sounds horrific.
It's about 5500 people per square mile. Really not all that dense. It's not the wide open spaces, but it's not downtown-Manhattan or Tokyo or Shanghai dense.
And note: this is a WORST CASE, of putting everybody and ALL resources inside the USA. The rest of the WORLD - including the oceans - are completely empty. Want to spread out? Hey, we have Canada to use - that would cut the density down to almost nothing...
Another thing that is completely neglected is future population growth. The reason people like you think that overpopulation is a myth is because you're only thinking within the timeframe of your own life. It's that old, "won't be a problem until after I'm dead" shrug off of a problem. Some people actually care about future generations, even if they won't be around to enjoy their company.
I live in Shanghai most of the time (here right now, actually). It's population is already slowing, as are the populations of India and most of Southeast Asia (3 of the 4 most populous nations are here: China, India, and Indonesia). As populations gain wealth and comfort - move upscale - they start to cut back on their own numbers inherently. You no longer need 17 children to work the farm, or 4 kids to care for you when you're sick.
And finally, the environmental impact isn't taken into account at all. Waste management, air pollution, water pollution, and the preservation of natural ecosystems are all neglected.
Sewage shouldn't be a problem, and with proper management neither is air nor water pollution. As for the ecosystems, we keep every square meter of parks and national forests in the US, and the REST OF THE WORLD is untouched by man, left completely natural. I don't think you can get more "low footprint" than that! Less than 2% of the world used for everything.
Quality of life is important.
Sure, you still have all those parks and forests in the US to enjoy - anything that's public or private recreation now, you still have. And of course, the REST OF THE WORLD can be a nature preserve for enjoyment.
Actually, I think more automated farming is what's required. It increases harvest ratios and productivity of the soil. There's a reason the US grows so much more per acre than most other nations...
We don't have a distribution or a resource problem, we have a starvation problem.
Distribution results in starvation. There is plenty of food in the world, it just is not distributed properly.
When I've gone on humanitarian aid trips to Haiti, Sudan, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and a half-dozen other shitholes around the world, the issue hasn't been one of getting supplies and food IN to the country, and getting it there in sufficient quantities. The issue has been making sure it goes to those who need it, rather than those who desire it.
For most of the starving world, food is a weapon used by the local thug/"political leader" to wield against the people and enforce their will. Most of the time, the ONLY reason food and medicine was properly dispensed and rationed and CONSUMED was because of those firearms carried by the soldiers around us.
You want to know how to solve the starvation problem? Use an assault rifle in the hands of a trained soldier and kill the scum who choose to enforce starvation for their own sociopathic, twisted pleasure or gain. A bullet to the head of a few dozen scum would quickly change the way most of those thugs operate and at least food supplies would get through.
Yes, that's not politically correct, and I guess many would call it uncivilized. But most of those thugs and cretins care not for Western reasoning or compassion. They get the food, drink, money and women as they want, without repercussion.
Why should the want to give up power and control - to make the West feel happy? Heck no! They WANT pictures of starving orphans, of emaciated women on the TV because they know - they KNOW - that we in West will spend billions of dollars to send food and drugs and equipment to "solve the problem". And they can sit back and take it for their own pleasure and use and power.
You either write the people off - ignore the suffering - or you simply execute the bastards in charge. There is no other solution.
It's not starvation - there is plenty of food. It's distribution. From thugs stealing food shipments to countries erecting insane barriers to the import/export of food. Distribution - not production - is the problem.
Please see the parent's post, the post I responded to, in particular his claim that Steve jobs has not interest in shaping the Internet into a "consume, consume, consume" form. Then see the dictionary entry for the word "sarcasm".
The overpopulation myth. Bottom line - we could provide for every single person living on this planet with just the resources inside the US. Never mind the rest of the world. We're a LONG way from overpopulation... We have a distribution - not resource - problem to solve.
This one. It's a full featured tablet, lacking 3G but has WIFI, removable SD Card memory, USB ports, HDMI output, a decent screen (same pixel density as the iPad), pretty good battery life (7-8 hours of music and book reading), Android 2.1 and Android Market access. And you can get them for well under $200; a friend here in Shanghai just picked one up - with a leather folding cover/case that includes an integrated keyboard - for $140.
Look around. You can find pretty powerful Android 2.1 tablets for cheap. A friend here in Shanghai just bought one - with a USB keyboard in the cover - for 960 RMB, about $140. I've had one for several months now, and it's been a great tablet - does everything I could want a tablet to do, and is very affordable. It's only a matter of time before a bigger brand starts importing these into the EU and the US.
Yes, Apple's iPads and iPhones and iPods are about media production, not consumption...
Or, as any seasoned coder would tell you, a single line of C.
So, it sucks worse than previous iPhones, but is still better than other consumer electronics, so therefore ignore the doubling of failures... Got it.
If I was an MS VP, I'd keep offering WinMo 6.5, but with a skinned version of SPB Mobile Shell on top of it. The skin would make it look more like WP7 (colors, flat tiles, etc) but you would retain 100% of the monster functionality of WinMo 6.5. And this would become WP7 Pro - targeted squarely at enterprise/heavy-duty users.
WinMo 6.5 has a tremendous amount of functionality and capability - way beyond iOS, Android, Symbian, WP7, any of the others. It's just got an ugly, jumbled interface as stock. Microsoft should just buy a great, slick UI that already exists and ship THAT as stock. It would really give them a one-two punch in the smartphone market: WP7 for the consumer oriented iOS/Android segment, and WP7 Pro for the RIM/Symbian business oriented segment.
Not having to actually USE the phone to access those things (because they're the default, customized to my needs home screen) is the ultimate ease-of-use.
Same here. Be it iTunes, or iPads, or iPhones, or whatever comes from Apple, they all serve as lock-in tools. Take iOS for instance. The only major mobile OS that isn't cross-hardware-platform. It's based on OSX, which originated on POSIX, so they should have been able to offer a POSIX version and may have been very profitable. The reason they don't is because it doesn't fit their larger business plan, which is to force users to use Apple for everything. As long as they have phone and media monopolies, they'll do this. We'll see them start to play nicely as soon as they lose their monopoly (as we're beginning to see with iOS). This is the biggest reason I avoid Apple.
Next is their despicable behavior, like what they did in the Google Voice debacle. I'll consider Apple when they start completing fairly and introduce some ethics into their business. They could start by offering their software on other platforms in the cases where it would be profitable.
Fixed that for you...
Hardware is rock-solid, too. It has a real keyboard, screen with resolution that's ONLY eclipsed by the iPhone 4 (and just barely at that), and tons of other hardware features lacking in many phones (microSD card and removable battery, for example) And let's not forget CDMA and GSM chipsets so I can use it around the world (GSM with various SIM cards) and on the reliable, fast Verizon network in the US.
Slick enough it was fun to do a demo from at last year's CES, when I demo'd for a bunch of Apple guys a new speaker system, streaming Bluetooth from my phone while showing a PowerPoint presentation, and letting them use it as a WIFI hotspot so they could actually get some bandwidth for their iPhones... Oh, and we had a Skype conference going from the phone at the same time.
That's what Apple does with jailbreakers, after all!
So he won't be so ronery any more...
Same thing, here. I'm in my apartment in Shanghai, reading this and the two source articles, no problem at all. I think this is probably a little overblown in coverage, it's not as restrictive as most think. In fact, Netflix and Hulu are more restrictive (including have a blocked list of US proxies) than most of China, and that includes the China Telecom DSL I'm using right now.
Dell gets that music player for the same price as Apple, and sells it to you for $20. Apple sells it to you for $40.
Now you tell me who can afford to pay more for the product - Dell or Apple?
BTW: insults and invectives are the surest sign of ignorance.
One company has a couple of products which provide the majority of its profits. And these products are at risk as applications transition to the cloud. Most other lines break even or lose money.
Yep, you just described Apple perfectly. The iPhone and the iPod Touch are where they make the lion's share of their money. And with apps moving to the cloud, functionality like running Flash and supporting dynamically loaded libraries and client-side scripting becomes critical. Of course, those are the very things Apple refuses to allow you to do...
The other company sells high profit margin products as fast as they can produce them and is constantly finding ways to make moribund and imaginary product areas fabulously profitable.
Yes, that would be Microsoft. Their profit margin is about double that of Apple, indicative of selling high profit margin products.
Thanks for proving my point - Apple's stock price is in a media-hype-driven bubble.
You talked about records. What record did then-candidate Obama have that you could use to judge his "suitability" on civil liberties? He talked a lot, but what actual record did the man have - what actions or votes did he take that were different from those of Senator McCain during the period Obama was a senator?
Apple market cap today: 260B Microsoft market cap today: 212B
Yes, bubbles driven by media exposure pumps up market caps way beyond reality.
Company 1: more revenue, more profit in absolute dollars, higher profit margin, complete dominance in its markets which are core to the functioning of modern society, pays a decent dividend. Diversified beyond the "cult of personality" of being all about a specific individual/founder.
Company 2: less revenue, less profit in absolute dollars, lower profit margin, losing market share in its markets (which are not core to society), pays no dividend. Still a cult of personality that relies upon the ideas/guidance of a single man with health issues.
Yeah, company 2 only has a higher market cap if it's in a bubble. And bubble is what Apple's stock price certainly is.
Uh, Windows 7 Home plus Microsoft Works (more akin to the iWork lightweight stuff that Apple ships) is about $150. Cheaper. Sorry!
Maybe because Apple loves to charge twice what those other companies charge for the same basic product? Apple's got the margin, and their fanbois love to crow about it...