Anti-cloning makes more sense than anything really. What does microsoft REALLY care if you use a kinect with your Linux PC? Or even your windows PC.
Microsoft probably cares very much if Kinect sales are not perceived in the marketplace as indicative of the Xbox 360 Kinect-using market, since the market penetration of the Xbox360+Kinect combo is a point to use in getting devs to make games for that combo.
If one person does it, sure, they don't care. But if it is perceived as being widespread, they certainly care. Which means if it is being covered in a public forum with substantial exposure, they have a strong incentive to respond to it.
No holiday time, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no restrictions on hours worked, no mandated breaks, few health and safety regulations, can be fired without notice or reason, can legally discriminate, etc.
While much of that is true for certain classes of workers (essentially, those that are "exempt" under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which includes most white-collar workers), most of it is not true for most workers. "few health and safety regulations" is (compared to other advanced industrial democracies) probably the only one that is universally true.
Discrimination is restricted by Federal, and in many cases also State, employment laws, and certain degrees of sick and maternity/paternity leave are guaranteed in Federal and often State law (e.g., the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.) Though, compared to the related policies in most other modern industrial democracies, even these protections are rather weak.
There is a reason that the US has historically had the highest productivity per worker, while also being fairly low in productivity per worker-hour among first world states.
Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.
While I haven't lived and worked in any first world country other than the US, that's pretty much what I hear from everyone who has done that and also worked in the US (whether they came from the US and then spent some time working abroad or vice versa.) Unsurprisingly, most people in the US aren't aware of how bad it is compared to other first world countries, nor, it seems, are most people who haven't worked here in other first-world countries. And part of that seems to be that the gulf in standards is so enormous that, on both sides, its very common for people who haven't experienced it to assume that it can't be as big as it is reported to be people who have experienced.
You're overstating several issues. One, just about EVERY job in the US that is full time has vacation and sick leave that accrues,
Most private-sector (and many public sector) jobs I'm familiar with have gone to a single pool of leave (often called "annual leave" or "paid time off") that combines vacation and sick leave.
In many cases, public sector employers I am familiar with require non-represented employees to use "annual leave" (in amounts which are greater the amounts represented employees would have in either sick leave or vacation individually, but smaller than the combined total), while represented (unionized) employees have vacation + sick leave by default but may opt in to the annual leave program.
I debate your last statement because of the inability to fire from the government for incompetence/laziness
Its quite possible to fire government workers for failure to properly perform the duties of their position whether due to incompetence or laziness. As is not infrequently the case in large private employers (even those without civil service rules and unions, as even in states where employees can be dismissed for no cause, the risk of lawsuits alleging for dismissal for an illegal, discriminatory cause exists) documentation of objective failure to meet those requirements is generally essential.
OTOH, give how far public sector compensation (even pay and benefits combined) lags beyond the private sector, there's a pretty big risk that after spending the effort to document the nonperformance and fire the worker and go through the hiring process (if the authorities above don't decide to hold the position open to absorb the risk of future budget cuts, which seems to happen frequently in bad budget times, often resulting in the position being lost entirely) you won't have much better options when you try to replace the worker.
And the poor pay for public sector employees and the problem of attracting good people to fill those positions doesn't happen just at the line level, it goes the whole way up through management to the executive level. So that affects the decisions of when and how to use the existing authority (and, even, the accuracy of management's assessment of what authority they have.)
and the opposition of unions to merit pay in government service.
IME, unions only tend to be opposed to so-called merit pay when it is one of two things: 1. a code word for arbitrary pay unconnected to any meaningful assessment of merit, or 2. a code word for pay connected to an objective measure that is largely a function of something other than the employees performance.
Unions are, IME, supportive of merit pay proposals that aren't in those categories, such as the system of merit salary increases used in the California State civil service.
While white-collar office workers are often treated better than other workers in most respects, this is mostly due to the fact that they have rarer talents and jobs which require certain degrees of independence. The statements in GGP about lack of government-guaranteed legal rights are, in fact, more true of white-collar office workers (who are generally FLSA exempt workers, or at least treated as such even in cases where there is a very good argument available that that isn't the correct legal category) than of, e.g., blue-collar factory workers.
A distinction that's lost on many people is that "freedom of speech" in the US legal system applies to the government, not private entities.
A distinction that is lost on many people (including, all too often, the US courts) is that corporations are, in point of fact, creatures of government, not independently-existing private entities. The only independently-existing private
That was precisely my point - "cannot handle full-motion video" is not a reason to not use color EInk when you already use B&W EInk in your products,
"Cannot handle full-motion video" may, though, be a reason (along with price) that, where companies determine that the demand for color is sufficient to drive a decision to produce an e-reader product that does not use B&W e-Ink, the choice is color LCD, not color e-Ink.
The reason not to choose color e-Ink over B&W e-Ink is probably just cost (though there may be display quality issues, as well.)
TV Tropes has the first amendment right to say whatever they like. Google has an equal right not to support them. This is exactly how censorship should work.
Saying that Google should have the legal right to do this (or to refrain from doing this) is not the same thing as saying that Google should do it.
It is possible to believe both that the law should not prevent a particular course of action while at the same time believing that the actor that is legally free to take that course of action should not choose to do so.
This should be applauded as a shining example of the 1st amendment at it's best, not as if Google is trying to squash their speech.
Since that is exactly what Google is doing, I disagree. The first amendment at its best is when people exercising their legal freedoms provided by the First Amendment use them in manners that produce good outcomes, not when they do so and produce bad outcomes that, nevertheless, are not so bad as to be worse than the sum of bad outcomes that would be produced when people aren't free.
This should be, at best, recognized as an accepted cost of 1st Amendment freedom, not celebrated as the First Amendment at its best.
Does this mean that we can use the source code to port F# to other platform such as GCC and LLVM?
You probably could, but there are plenty of functional, including ML-family, languages available for non-.NET platforms, and the main advantage of F# over other similar languages is.NET integration.
They pay for cable because they are old fogies who don't want the intertubes to interfere with their TV.
I pay for cable, and I also have both a PS3 and PC that can display on the TV in my livingroom, and regularly use the TV for internet delivered video. I also have Netflix. I'm not sure that mid-30s makes me an "old fogie", but whatever.
I prefer not to pay for access and have commercials, given the option, but there is enough content that I (or, at least, the people living in my house collectively) want that is on cable that isn't easy enough to get without commercials some other way that its (for now) worth having.
As I pointed out in a separate comment, I'm not criticizing Ubuntu for what they're doing. Rather, I'm being critical of their approach
The only thing you've pointed to about their approach is their statement that they are willing to work with KDE and GNOME. What is the problem with that?
and frankly for the attitude that they appear to have about it.
What attitude?
To now be trying to steer the entire free desktop market in their direction as they make major changes seems to me a bit presumptive.
This kind of thing -- sometimes successful, sometimes not -- is how progress happens. It doesn't come from people who think they have to be the old man of the industry before they can try to promote change.
I'm wondering if the Ubuntu crowd isn't letting their success go to their heads just a tad. Just because they're the most popular distribution doesn't mean that they can start changing everything around and have everyone else follow their lead.
Are you objecting because Canonical has a vision for the future direction of the desktop, or are you objecting that they are expressing willingness to work with GNOME and KDE to work toward that vision while minimizing fragmentation?
So now we're saying it's okay to pirate but not sell what you pirate?
No, "we're" not saying anything of the sort. Slashdot isn't a group with a consensus viewpoint on either issue.
It may be that there are more people on Slashdot that are opposed to selling what you pirate than are opposed to pirating in the first place (and then again, there are plenty of people on Slashdot that are selective in their approval of piracy, e.g., okay with downloading music, not okay with using software offered under the GPL outside of the permissions in that license.)
Slashdot is a lot of people with a lot of different views. Its not a hivemind.
I've also seen Waterfall and Agile colliding really badly. Company orientates to Agile, customer to Waterfall. Agile was seen as the best approach by customer as well after starting project, but at the end customer demands back to Waterfall by demanding all features in requirements to be done, after the provider has done A LOT of features outside the scope, in exchange for some in the initial requirements which were A) useless B) impractical.
That's not a problem of development methodology (either of them, or a clash between them.)
Its a problem of insufficiently clear obligations in a contract, or possibly of casual disregard for the obligations in the contract midway through its performance. Which is a whole different problem.
Can we just say asexual reproduction when we mean asexual reproduction, and leave misquoting the Bible to Christians please?
"Immaculate Conception" is not a phrase that appears in the Bible, and even if it was, misusing it, unless the misuse was in a purported quote from the bible, wouldn't be misquoting the Bible.
The mistake here is making an reference to inapplicable Catholic doctrine, not misquoting the Bible.
but is suffering from lack of support for a burgeoning variety of PMPs, ereaders, tablets, netbooks etc. which are trying to use it.
Android's target market might be evident from the fact that it is owned by the Open Handset Alliance.
Its a free-to-use OS so companies in other markets might can choose to use it even if the OHA isn't targeting the market they are in, and its an open-source OS so those companies are also free to customize it to meet the needs of their market, but generally they are peripheral to the strategy for the OS.
Google's message is really confused.
Android is a handset operating system. ChromeOS is essentially a notebook/desktop operating system with a buffed-up web browser as the standard graphical shell.
Unlike some OS vendors, neither Google nor the Open Handset Alliance are particularly interested in stopping vendors from using either operating system outside of the principle target market, but each has a clear principal target market.
Arguably as confused or worse as Microsoft supporting Windows Phone 7 AND Kin.
I think its more like Apple supporting both iOS and OSX.
It's confusing to everybody.
Its not confusing to me. It doesn't seem to be confusing to hardware vendors. "You" != "everybody".
Its clear that Android has longer legs than ChromeOS
I don't think that's clear at all; its clear that Android is far more well established than ChromeOS is (which is not the same thing.) Which is one reason why it makes sense for Google to release ChromeOS separately: why saddle the established Android ecosystem with baggage related to a peripherally-related target market? Shared components and other positive synergies are possible without that, and the time for convergence is once you've got both well-established in their respective niches and can converge them without breaking the momentum that either has.
to an outside observer it looks like two rival camps inside Google are having a turf war.
I would say that says more about the outside observer's lack of vision than any problem at Google.
The CEO should be killing one project and moving the good stuff into the other.
I can see where that might seem to be the case to someone grounded in traditional management practices, unfamiliar with lean software development, and unable to see why you would have one faily conservative project aimed at meeting clear, well-established immediate needs and a riskier (but bigger potential payoff), longer-term project aimed at meeting more distant needs in a related or broader market that might eventually subsume the immediate one, and why you might want to keep those separate from (though informed by) each other.
That would be interesting data if it only showed anything about who the corporations themselves support. Unfortunately, while it breaks out the share of the donations it associates with each firm by the share coming from PACs and the share coming from individuals who are employed by the firm, it doesn't break out the partisan distributions separately by PAC funds vs. individual, and individual contributions by employees don't indicate the alignment of the firm's interests (individual donations by shareholders, weighted by ownership share would, but donations aren't reported that way, so an organization simply throwing a query interface on top of the data required to be reported can't tally that.) And individual contributions are by far the biggest share of those figures.
But if you go back to cycles before 2002 (that is, those that were completely before corporate "soft money" was banned, 2002 being a year that was part before and part after the ban) -- and soft money was direct corporate funding to parties which did represent the corporate interest, not the personal interest of the people who work for the company -- you'll note that the ratios are much closer.
Seems a little silly, the proper approach is to file a motion to quash the trial subpoena. It's a pretty simple motion and would be a lot easier than hiding your CEO.
Not if, despite your PR, there was no valid reason to quash to subpoena. So, one must conclude that either HP is acting irrationally, or...
That isn't remotely relevant to the issue I raised about questions about whether Democrats are really closer than Republicans to the megacorporations that run the studios, who are the people that the MPAA/RIAA/etc. represent. You've pointed to the Obama administration hiring people who previously the RIAA hired to represent them, which isn't relevant to any comparative question, and isn't relevant to proximity to corporations the *AAs represent.
On the whole the Democrats were always befriended by Hollywood in ways Republicans were not, so I would hope a lot of new Republicans would be cool to the MPAA and other organizations...
Democrats may have greater support among the Hollywood celebrities that are visible to the public, but I don't think there is much evidence that they have closer ties to the megacorps that actually own the studios, who are who the MPAA represents.
The biggest ISP no-no we have seen was Comcast and torrent tomfoolery. But no net neutrality ideas under discussions would have stopped that, because in that case Comcast forged traffic, they didn't limit anything.
Forging packets as a mechanism to foil the use of any lawful software or device would violate every net neutrality proposal I've seen, all of which prohibit ISPs from preventing the customer from using any lawful device or software without regard to the mechanism by which that is done.
That process includes measurable goals and the breaking of work into understandable small tasks (often at the expense of the whole).
No, its not "understandable small tasks".
Its indivisible units of value.
Essentially, a proper unit of work in agile is a project in its own right. Its just a project of the narrowest possible scope to deliver positive value without depending on any prospective future work.
Its a mechanism for reducing the backlog of work for which costs have been paid but which isn't yet producing value for the organization. It also manages the risk of change, because requirements changes that affect the work that hasn't been done yet on a product don't delay the release of the work that has been done. (There are ways that it mitigates the cost of change even when it affects the work that has been done, but that's different aspects of agile than how you scope iterations.)
That reeks of managerial BS.
In that that bit of Agile is mostly about accelerating return on investment and managing organizational risk its clearly "managerial" in some sense. (Software development is generally not art for arts own sake, it serves a business purpose, and much of agile is about better aligning what is done in software development with the business interests of the organization it is being done for.)
Whether its BS or not, well, you certainly haven't put forward an argument for why it is bad.
The benefits that ChromeOS touts boil down to fast boot and web apps. I don't see either as things that couldn't be integrated with Android.
Since Google's CEO has openly stated that the long term strategy is forAndroid and ChromeOS to converge, I would expect that there it is not by accident that every feature and advantage of one is something that could be integrated in the other.
Iterations should be on the order of a week or two, not 3 months.
Iterations should be sized based on what is typically needed to complete a coherent unit of work with independent value (that is, even if you aren't shipping after each iteration, the stuff that's done in the iteration should be such that if you did ship, it would be complete, useful functionality, not dangling pieces that aren't valuable on their own.)
If, for a particular product, that's 3 months, then the iterations should be 3 months. If you aren't completing independent units of work in iterations, you are creating additional overhead costs in managing the iterations, but not producing the value for that cost that development in iterations that deliver value is designed to produce.
It may be the case that on a typical product 1-2 week timelines are more appropriate, but one of the things agile is against is taking processes that work on a "typical project" and holding them up as Received Wisdom that is uncritically applied everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft probably cares very much if Kinect sales are not perceived in the marketplace as indicative of the Xbox 360 Kinect-using market, since the market penetration of the Xbox360+Kinect combo is a point to use in getting devs to make games for that combo.
If one person does it, sure, they don't care. But if it is perceived as being widespread, they certainly care. Which means if it is being covered in a public forum with substantial exposure, they have a strong incentive to respond to it.
While much of that is true for certain classes of workers (essentially, those that are "exempt" under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which includes most white-collar workers), most of it is not true for most workers. "few health and safety regulations" is (compared to other advanced industrial democracies) probably the only one that is universally true.
Discrimination is restricted by Federal, and in many cases also State, employment laws, and certain degrees of sick and maternity/paternity leave are guaranteed in Federal and often State law (e.g., the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.) Though, compared to the related policies in most other modern industrial democracies, even these protections are rather weak.
There is a reason that the US has historically had the highest productivity per worker, while also being fairly low in productivity per worker-hour among first world states.
While I haven't lived and worked in any first world country other than the US, that's pretty much what I hear from everyone who has done that and also worked in the US (whether they came from the US and then spent some time working abroad or vice versa.) Unsurprisingly, most people in the US aren't aware of how bad it is compared to other first world countries, nor, it seems, are most people who haven't worked here in other first-world countries. And part of that seems to be that the gulf in standards is so enormous that, on both sides, its very common for people who haven't experienced it to assume that it can't be as big as it is reported to be people who have experienced.
Most private-sector (and many public sector) jobs I'm familiar with have gone to a single pool of leave (often called "annual leave" or "paid time off") that combines vacation and sick leave.
In many cases, public sector employers I am familiar with require non-represented employees to use "annual leave" (in amounts which are greater the amounts represented employees would have in either sick leave or vacation individually, but smaller than the combined total), while represented (unionized) employees have vacation + sick leave by default but may opt in to the annual leave program.
Its quite possible to fire government workers for failure to properly perform the duties of their position whether due to incompetence or laziness. As is not infrequently the case in large private employers (even those without civil service rules and unions, as even in states where employees can be dismissed for no cause, the risk of lawsuits alleging for dismissal for an illegal, discriminatory cause exists) documentation of objective failure to meet those requirements is generally essential.
OTOH, give how far public sector compensation (even pay and benefits combined) lags beyond the private sector, there's a pretty big risk that after spending the effort to document the nonperformance and fire the worker and go through the hiring process (if the authorities above don't decide to hold the position open to absorb the risk of future budget cuts, which seems to happen frequently in bad budget times, often resulting in the position being lost entirely) you won't have much better options when you try to replace the worker.
And the poor pay for public sector employees and the problem of attracting good people to fill those positions doesn't happen just at the line level, it goes the whole way up through management to the executive level. So that affects the decisions of when and how to use the existing authority (and, even, the accuracy of management's assessment of what authority they have.)
IME, unions only tend to be opposed to so-called merit pay when it is one of two things:
1. a code word for arbitrary pay unconnected to any meaningful assessment of merit, or
2. a code word for pay connected to an objective measure that is largely a function of something other than the employees performance.
Unions are, IME, supportive of merit pay proposals that aren't in those categories, such as the system of merit salary increases used in the California State civil service.
While white-collar office workers are often treated better than other workers in most respects, this is mostly due to the fact that they have rarer talents and jobs which require certain degrees of independence. The statements in GGP about lack of government-guaranteed legal rights are, in fact, more true of white-collar office workers (who are generally FLSA exempt workers, or at least treated as such even in cases where there is a very good argument available that that isn't the correct legal category) than of, e.g., blue-collar factory workers.
A distinction that is lost on many people (including, all too often, the US courts) is that corporations are, in point of fact, creatures of government, not independently-existing private entities. The only independently-existing private
"Cannot handle full-motion video" may, though, be a reason (along with price) that, where companies determine that the demand for color is sufficient to drive a decision to produce an e-reader product that does not use B&W e-Ink, the choice is color LCD, not color e-Ink.
The reason not to choose color e-Ink over B&W e-Ink is probably just cost (though there may be display quality issues, as well.)
Saying that Google should have the legal right to do this (or to refrain from doing this) is not the same thing as saying that Google should do it.
It is possible to believe both that the law should not prevent a particular course of action while at the same time believing that the actor that is legally free to take that course of action should not choose to do so.
Since that is exactly what Google is doing, I disagree. The first amendment at its best is when people exercising their legal freedoms provided by the First Amendment use them in manners that produce good outcomes, not when they do so and produce bad outcomes that, nevertheless, are not so bad as to be worse than the sum of bad outcomes that would be produced when people aren't free.
This should be, at best, recognized as an accepted cost of 1st Amendment freedom, not celebrated as the First Amendment at its best.
You probably could, but there are plenty of functional, including ML-family, languages available for non-.NET platforms, and the main advantage of F# over other similar languages is .NET integration.
I pay for cable, and I also have both a PS3 and PC that can display on the TV in my livingroom, and regularly use the TV for internet delivered video. I also have Netflix. I'm not sure that mid-30s makes me an "old fogie", but whatever.
I prefer not to pay for access and have commercials, given the option, but there is enough content that I (or, at least, the people living in my house collectively) want that is on cable that isn't easy enough to get without commercials some other way that its (for now) worth having.
The only thing you've pointed to about their approach is their statement that they are willing to work with KDE and GNOME. What is the problem with that?
What attitude?
This kind of thing -- sometimes successful, sometimes not -- is how progress happens. It doesn't come from people who think they have to be the old man of the industry before they can try to promote change.
Are you objecting because Canonical has a vision for the future direction of the desktop, or are you objecting that they are expressing willingness to work with GNOME and KDE to work toward that vision while minimizing fragmentation?
Neither, Slashdot isn't an entity with a single viewpoint, its a forum with quite a lot of members, each of whom has their own viewpoint.
No, "we're" not saying anything of the sort. Slashdot isn't a group with a consensus viewpoint on either issue.
It may be that there are more people on Slashdot that are opposed to selling what you pirate than are opposed to pirating in the first place (and then again, there are plenty of people on Slashdot that are selective in their approval of piracy, e.g., okay with downloading music, not okay with using software offered under the GPL outside of the permissions in that license.)
Slashdot is a lot of people with a lot of different views. Its not a hivemind.
That's not a problem of development methodology (either of them, or a clash between them.)
Its a problem of insufficiently clear obligations in a contract, or possibly of casual disregard for the obligations in the contract midway through its performance. Which is a whole different problem.
"Immaculate Conception" is not a phrase that appears in the Bible, and even if it was, misusing it, unless the misuse was in a purported quote from the bible, wouldn't be misquoting the Bible.
The mistake here is making an reference to inapplicable Catholic doctrine, not misquoting the Bible.
Android is not a device.
Android's target market might be evident from the fact that it is owned by the Open Handset Alliance.
Its a free-to-use OS so companies in other markets might can choose to use it even if the OHA isn't targeting the market they are in, and its an open-source OS so those companies are also free to customize it to meet the needs of their market, but generally they are peripheral to the strategy for the OS.
Android is a handset operating system. ChromeOS is essentially a notebook/desktop operating system with a buffed-up web browser as the standard graphical shell.
Unlike some OS vendors, neither Google nor the Open Handset Alliance are particularly interested in stopping vendors from using either operating system outside of the principle target market, but each has a clear principal target market.
I think its more like Apple supporting both iOS and OSX.
Its not confusing to me. It doesn't seem to be confusing to hardware vendors. "You" != "everybody".
I don't think that's clear at all; its clear that Android is far more well established than ChromeOS is (which is not the same thing.) Which is one reason why it makes sense for Google to release ChromeOS separately: why saddle the established Android ecosystem with baggage related to a peripherally-related target market? Shared components and other positive synergies are possible without that, and the time for convergence is once you've got both well-established in their respective niches and can converge them without breaking the momentum that either has.
I would say that says more about the outside observer's lack of vision than any problem at Google.
I can see where that might seem to be the case to someone grounded in traditional management practices, unfamiliar with lean software development, and unable to see why you would have one faily conservative project aimed at meeting clear, well-established immediate needs and a riskier (but bigger potential payoff), longer-term project aimed at meeting more distant needs in a related or broader market that might eventually subsume the immediate one, and why you might want to keep those separate from (though informed by) each other.
That would be interesting data if it only showed anything about who the corporations themselves support. Unfortunately, while it breaks out the share of the donations it associates with each firm by the share coming from PACs and the share coming from individuals who are employed by the firm, it doesn't break out the partisan distributions separately by PAC funds vs. individual, and individual contributions by employees don't indicate the alignment of the firm's interests (individual donations by shareholders, weighted by ownership share would, but donations aren't reported that way, so an organization simply throwing a query interface on top of the data required to be reported can't tally that.) And individual contributions are by far the biggest share of those figures.
But if you go back to cycles before 2002 (that is, those that were completely before corporate "soft money" was banned, 2002 being a year that was part before and part after the ban) -- and soft money was direct corporate funding to parties which did represent the corporate interest, not the personal interest of the people who work for the company -- you'll note that the ratios are much closer.
Not if, despite your PR, there was no valid reason to quash to subpoena. So, one must conclude that either HP is acting irrationally, or...
That isn't remotely relevant to the issue I raised about questions about whether Democrats are really closer than Republicans to the megacorporations that run the studios, who are the people that the MPAA/RIAA/etc. represent. You've pointed to the Obama administration hiring people who previously the RIAA hired to represent them, which isn't relevant to any comparative question, and isn't relevant to proximity to corporations the *AAs represent.
Democrats may have greater support among the Hollywood celebrities that are visible to the public, but I don't think there is much evidence that they have closer ties to the megacorps that actually own the studios, who are who the MPAA represents.
Forging packets as a mechanism to foil the use of any lawful software or device would violate every net neutrality proposal I've seen, all of which prohibit ISPs from preventing the customer from using any lawful device or software without regard to the mechanism by which that is done.
I seem to recall that the British had a problem with the US's freedom before anyone else did.
No, its not "understandable small tasks".
Its indivisible units of value.
Essentially, a proper unit of work in agile is a project in its own right. Its just a project of the narrowest possible scope to deliver positive value without depending on any prospective future work.
Its a mechanism for reducing the backlog of work for which costs have been paid but which isn't yet producing value for the organization. It also manages the risk of change, because requirements changes that affect the work that hasn't been done yet on a product don't delay the release of the work that has been done. (There are ways that it mitigates the cost of change even when it affects the work that has been done, but that's different aspects of agile than how you scope iterations.)
In that that bit of Agile is mostly about accelerating return on investment and managing organizational risk its clearly "managerial" in some sense. (Software development is generally not art for arts own sake, it serves a business purpose, and much of agile is about better aligning what is done in software development with the business interests of the organization it is being done for.)
Whether its BS or not, well, you certainly haven't put forward an argument for why it is bad.
Since Google's CEO has openly stated that the long term strategy is forAndroid and ChromeOS to converge, I would expect that there it is not by accident that every feature and advantage of one is something that could be integrated in the other.
Iterations should be sized based on what is typically needed to complete a coherent unit of work with independent value (that is, even if you aren't shipping after each iteration, the stuff that's done in the iteration should be such that if you did ship, it would be complete, useful functionality, not dangling pieces that aren't valuable on their own.)
If, for a particular product, that's 3 months, then the iterations should be 3 months. If you aren't completing independent units of work in iterations, you are creating additional overhead costs in managing the iterations, but not producing the value for that cost that development in iterations that deliver value is designed to produce.
It may be the case that on a typical product 1-2 week timelines are more appropriate, but one of the things agile is against is taking processes that work on a "typical project" and holding them up as Received Wisdom that is uncritically applied everywhere.
Assumes facts not in evidence. To wit, "most projects work".