Since Summer of 2016, I've been using my iPhone Apple Wallet at Bank of America ATMs in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area and Chicago. January road trip between Buffalo, NY and El Paso Tx, (don't ask) I used it a few times also, but don't remember the cities.
I don't carry an ATM card anymore, even for back up.
People complained about electronic locks when a mechanical key would do fine
DOS users complained about how the mouse was for simpletons Then complained about trackpads replacing mice,
Records replaced by tapes, then DVDS, then by streaming
ATMs replaced tellers, then went online
RFIDs replaced bar codes which had replaced stamping a price on each retail item
Credit cards replaced checks, and are replaced by electronic wallets
Copper wire based phones were replaced by cellular and Internet based phones
Add your 20-30 favorites implementations here.
All in the last 50 years since the simple audio jack came out.
How about instead of whining and complaining about technologies and products you don’t like or want, you just but something else.
Spend your electrons elsewhere.
Apple and Google (et al) experiment on technologies, glasses, social networks, chips, screens, VR, cloud stores, Lightning, Thunderbolt and USB-C connectors, Bluetooth and NFC. That’s why they are in business and you are all pundit wannabes.
I agree, some of my argument is ‘appeal to emotion’ and written as an emotional response. (I am not Spock.)
As humans, I believe many of our responses to evil, be it murder, child molestation, slavery, genocide, rape, prisoner abuse, certain government actions, violations of our perceived ‘rights' - are all emotional. There are people who, based on their emotional beliefs, make logical arguments for those actions (think ISIS, Stalin and Abu Ghraib - not to say that the last is anywhere near the evil magnitude of the first two examples).
Also, as people, cultures or countries, we determine which rights (i.e. laws) we grant to ourselves and how extremely we interpret their interaction. Fortunately, those change over time, we select new rights and sunset old ones (e.g. the right to treat people as property, aka slavery, also in the Constitution), but it would be hard to argue that emotions weren't involved. The 'logic' seems to follow whatever people emotionally determine to implement as rights (e.g. freedom from a king). Some people and countries are more collectivist, some more individual rights oriented, some religious, some believe in government driven economies, some prefer less government influence, some don't like their history denied, others edit their history liberally - all believe they are logical and often for 'the good of the epeople'.
So reducing it to emotional questions, demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of trying to impose America's version of rights into other environments and conversely the reverse: Does ISIS have the right to come to your local schools and spread their message in the name of Free Speech? Should somebody from Syria lecture you about their ‘rights.' Does Baidu have the right to publish results in the US that include misleading statements about corporations and stocks that have been pre-censored by it's government to encourage people to invest or subsidize Chinese industries? Should the US government require that type of information be removed or blocked? [BTW, I don’t think Baidu is wrong or evil, they are providing a service within the confines of their culture and legal system.]
In the end, who determines where the rights of one country intersect the rights of another? Don’t forget your ‘right to privacy’ from some foreign (or domestic) power.
Is the argument that evil, at any extreme, has the right to expression, in the name of free speech?
Does it follow then that you are willing to have the representatives from ISIS come to your local high schools and colleges and use their persuasive tactics to entice your neighbors and their children to massacre innocents in the name of some evil interpretation? Sleep well.
Why shouldn’t a country that has experienced an evil, magnitudes greater than ISIS, be allowed to determine what can, and what cannot, be said or distributed in its borders? [Remember, Americans think God gives them the right to pollute and police the world and everyone’s rights - it printed right on the dollar bill; “In God We Trust.”]
If you live in a country that interprets an eighteenth century individual ‘right', without taking 21st century technology into the equation, you are probably amongst the group that thinks some other 18th century ‘right’ also applies to 21st century weapons.
Fortunately only one country in the first world actually thinks that way. It’s also the same country with hundreds of religions that similarly interpret wisdom from preachers 2,000+ years ago as if nothing else has changed in the mean time. Those 'right thinking' people also control the dozens of states that allow Creationism to be taught as science, and they want their ‘rights' to have that interpretation included on national test standards. Twisted logic isn’t it?
Facebook operates and makes profit in many countries with limitations on information and the distribution of personal data. (China, Egypt, Dubai, Russia, India, EU etc.) they can and should respect German law in that country, or they should choose not to do business there. Easy. When Google couldn’t follow Chinese rules of censorship, they chose not to do business there. Today, Google’s principles have compromised the profit is more important than some ‘rights’.
There is no American ‘right’ to project its labyrinthine 18th century concepts into other countries where people consciously choose to limit the right of ISIS (or Nazis) to talk to their impressionable youth.
To paraphrase Zhou Enlai, "Let’s all check back in a hundred years and see if the American experiment continued to work.” No need for the rest of the world to follow them over a cliff.
Wow, an author from the online Atlantic needed a subject and found an intellectual from the Brookings Institute with an opinion on Silicon Valley. Better warn Apple before they spend a gazillion dollars in SV on a spaceship for their 25,000 employees. And Google, eBay, Oracle, HP, SalesForce.com, Microsoft (SV), Lockheed, the incubators, and Stanford need to get the memo... their 250,000 jobs will be in San Francisco and Oakland soon! And San Francisco better start building schools for their children..(BTW, S.F. is the largest school district in the country with a shrinking enrollment... the re-gentrification is raising prices so much that working and middle class are moving out.) These companies and the university create the spin-offs that attract the VC and the talent pool can't (and wouldn't) just up and move to Oakland, or Austin, or Chicago. The author mistakes regular seepage from Silicon Valley for a mass migration. Of course there are other opportunities and locales near S.V. and around the country, but for a long time the S.V. tech star will continue to have critical mass and to suck the majority of the VC funding into its orbit.
Every few years some academic looks at a growth spurt (like Pixar, Leap Frog and IKEA in a small town like Emeryville) and makes social and economic forecasts that can't be implemented in the real world. Then journalists assume that their academic degree validates the theory - and write these silly puff pieces.
The French are doing this for the same reason the Americans are persecuting Julian Assange.
Of course the information about this base is out, and of course 500,000 counselor posts were published and can't be retrieved. But, by chasing Assange around the world and into obscure embassies, they make the next person think a little more about what they post on-line. They want the public spectacle of making someone that shares purported 'classified' information eat some dirt or look over their shoulder. Maybe it prevents them from publishing the address of a safe house in Benghazi.
So we can print guns, and I'm sure bullets, but to make the bullets fly, something needs to explode in a little casing.. can a printer make the explosive?
Agreed, people don't have a right to parts or information from manufacturers, but I wouldn't mind a disclosure requirement on cameras, computers, TVs, appliances, et cetera, that cost over a certain amount, e.g. $500 or $1000.
Disclosure should cover that company's repair record on similar products and components, average cost of repairs and upgrades during the expected life of the product, shipping cost responsibilities, and whether external services are available or not allowed....
We end up shopping on price and features because the manufacturers get to hide the total cost of ownership. I'm surrounded by a Nikon camera, a Tivo and a kitchen full of 3 y.o. GE appliances that all have exorbitant repair costs for what should be minor repairs or scratches.
In less than three years, Jobs has sold 40 million iPhones and 40 million iPod Touches without multitasking, Flash or a camera for video conferencing.
Android and Xbox offer multitasking and Flash, buy them and quit complaining about features that 'pundits' think the product "needs."
Apple has kept its cutting edge products "closed" since 1984. Have you considered that possibly that is why they are where they are at ($38B in the bank), while other manufacturers from Osborne to Dell have ended up sucking air on the low margins that happen when they can't keep total vertical control over their products.
Android, in just its first year, is already showing signs of platform fragmentation and a competitive race to make the least expensive products. If you believe that model will win... buy some Motorola or HTC stock, they are pushing Android phones.
BTW: I do hope some company, maybe Google, can get its act together and make a competitive platform to challenge Apple's economy. Features and new paradigms from competition are the best way to compete with Apple. Continually copying and following another market defining company is not how Steve Jobs and Apple earned its position.
Western Electric made tens of millions of those phones for the Bell system. Most were expected to have a 25 year life span. Fifty years later, I'm sure a few million are still in use.
Bring me your Gameboy in 2035, I'll salute it then!
Some AP reporter who had to write a science article scared the beejeezuz out of you statistically challenged hypocondriacs?
RTFA, even it says that in surveying all the medical literature available, only two incidental reports of dogs with cancer associated with implants are found. There are a few million implanted dogs in this country! (It's been common practice at the vast majority of shelters to spay and implant for many years.) I asked my vet last year how many he has taken out - one was rejected out of hundreds he has done. He didn't mention cancer....
What about the mice? Mice seem to have a 10%, 4% or 1% cancer rate on chip implants (according to the article, which wasn't submitted to any scrutiny by anybody with a Phd, Masters or even a BS in biology from what I can tell.) Many simple causes haven't been investigated or at even discussed. (e.g. the chip may occupy 2-3% of the mouse' body mass, the same chip 0.1% of a dogs and 0.03% of a human (Carrie is petite after all.) Maybe there is a threshold where the immune system is overwhelmed. Get a grad student on it!
The article is poor science. Scare the old ladies with chipped dogs on Sunday morning (9/9) and get they're blood warming so they can do some more fear mongering on Tuesday.
Two of our three daughters went through the local middle school's (in the Bay area) lap top program. Lots of parental involvement and only interested teachers participated.
- Two of the girls are straight A, one B-, we've seen no evidence that the laptops effected their grades either way - Half of the kids participated at a parental cost of $1800 for three years (iBook + extended warranty + software.) The warranty was used by nearly every student, nobody designs a consumer notebook that can be carried by a 6th, 7th or 8h grader in a backpack for three years. Also, $100 of each participant was used to supply the computers for less economically capable kids. They standardized on Mac so that everyone would be on OSX, 802.11, same software versions etc. Wouldn't have been as easy if parents wanted to substitute their "old but still working Dell." A few MS fans refused to play. - Hardship on the teachers is converting lesson plans they were using for 10-15 years to Powerpoint, etc., and making them interactive. This naturally selected out the lazy teachers and some really good teachers that are just not technologists. - At least 20% of the kids are children of immigrants, many with the first computer in the house (unless a parent has an H1 visa with a Silicon Valley company.) At least they are one the technology treadmill with the rest of us. - Even though the school made modest claims of improved performance, I personally don't think the first 500 students are statistically significant enough to draw conclusions for the long view. - Our school district (20+K students) is now 95% online: grades updated daily, homework, schedules, etc. Every student makes Powerpoints, CDs, videos for classwork. The kids with middle school experience have some small advantage, but I don't think it makes them smarter. But they seem to be moe competent in the tools they will need for life.
Some of our experience: - Middle school is a great time to become computer literate, its helps to have the education system involved. - In three of the first five years there were a total of four "porn" anecdotes reported. The school routers blocked IM ports and also used porn filters, nothing installed on the kids computers so that they could be used at home as easily as school. - It would be nice if we could economically ruggedize notebooks for kids - 80-90% of parents would certainly do it again, knowing the results. Most of the rest got frustrated that the computers just couldn't put up with all the drops. - It takes at least a small cadre of dedicated teachers to make it work. The school board could not have dictated this as a solution to some perceived problem.
Conclusion: it would appear that if you have a problem school (or child) and you GIVE them a laptop, then you still have a problem, it just now has a laptop. i.e. Computers are not a cure or solution to any problem, but they probably are a technology that it is helpful to become skillful with as early as possible.
One sentence in a lame press release has been published up and down the industry from Yahoo to cNet.
Checking MetaFacts website I can't find a meaningful data point to work with or justify buying their report.
- Is it a flawed methodology? We can't tell anything from the quote... My wife and I have Macs (we're over 50), our three teenage daughters have Macs - how did they assign the units from my household? 5 owned by a 50+ ?
- Is one data point relevant... then I'd pick University bookstores in the US (not ownership because it doesn't reflect a changing market share**) Apple and several Windows manufacturers provide great discounts. An anecdotal study (as my senior high school daughter and I visited over twenty campuses in the last 18 months) determined that 20-25% of the computers bought on campus are Macs, mainly not by engineering students. Those kids made their own choice, not the one required by an IT department, and they bought 4x-5x more Macs than Apple's market share (last I saw it was hovering around 5%) would indicate. That survey would say the future is bright for Apple. (I'm a skeptic though)
- I've been in tech marketing for 20 years, have never bought a report from (or even heard of) MetaFacts - I spend more time laughing at the Gardner and Forester reports. I'm sure they are a reputable company, but their press releases make me wonder what they are thinking with their choice of subjects.
Cheers,
Flack
** Today's news said Toyota passed up Ford in unit sales last quarter. A comparable auto ownership survey would only indicate that a lot of old people own Fords and cast no light on the changing market share of Toyota.
The Cambrian period is named after a group of mountains (in Wales?); The St Peter Sandstone after a type of sandstone found near St Peter MO; maybe the anti native-American mascot people should write letters to the geologists that named the Oglala and Lakota formations in South Dakota and Wyoming after "indians"; etc.
Pluton seems to be a good "type" name for similar sized planets based on the first sample that was identified.
While it is fun to see the IAU get a big wedgie about this classification business, their categories (moon, planet, etc.) seem antiquated considering what we do know about solar systems. (Remember when taxonomy meant anything in water was a fish - a shell fish, a fish with mammeries?) Biology, in many cases has moved from superficial "does it have wings? It must be a bird" to cladistics - "What did it evolve from?"
I agree with a previous writer who said future generations will laugh at our short term perspectives.
Cheers,
Flack?
Slashdot Mirror
Since Summer of 2016, I've been using my iPhone Apple Wallet at Bank of America ATMs in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area and Chicago. January road trip between Buffalo, NY and El Paso Tx, (don't ask) I used it a few times also, but don't remember the cities.
I don't carry an ATM card anymore, even for back up.
I've appreciated the IMDB forums, only posted a few dozen times in ten plus years.
So where are the alternative sites for forums? Rotten Tomatoes?
Thanks
Lets see
People complained about electronic locks when a mechanical key would do fine
DOS users complained about how the mouse was for simpletons
Then complained about trackpads replacing mice,
Records replaced by tapes, then DVDS, then by streaming
ATMs replaced tellers, then went online
RFIDs replaced bar codes which had replaced stamping a price on each retail item
Credit cards replaced checks, and are replaced by electronic wallets
Copper wire based phones were replaced by cellular and Internet based phones
Add your 20-30 favorites implementations here.
All in the last 50 years since the simple audio jack came out.
How about instead of whining and complaining about technologies and products you don’t like or want, you just but something else.
Spend your electrons elsewhere.
Apple and Google (et al) experiment on technologies, glasses, social networks, chips, screens, VR, cloud stores, Lightning, Thunderbolt and USB-C connectors, Bluetooth and NFC. That’s why they are in business and you are all pundit wannabes.
Get over yourselves.
I agree, some of my argument is ‘appeal to emotion’ and written as an emotional response. (I am not Spock.)
As humans, I believe many of our responses to evil, be it murder, child molestation, slavery, genocide, rape, prisoner abuse, certain government actions, violations of our perceived ‘rights' - are all emotional. There are people who, based on their emotional beliefs, make logical arguments for those actions (think ISIS, Stalin and Abu Ghraib - not to say that the last is anywhere near the evil magnitude of the first two examples).
Also, as people, cultures or countries, we determine which rights (i.e. laws) we grant to ourselves and how extremely we interpret their interaction. Fortunately, those change over time, we select new rights and sunset old ones (e.g. the right to treat people as property, aka slavery, also in the Constitution), but it would be hard to argue that emotions weren't involved. The 'logic' seems to follow whatever people emotionally determine to implement as rights (e.g. freedom from a king). Some people and countries are more collectivist, some more individual rights oriented, some religious, some believe in government driven economies, some prefer less government influence, some don't like their history denied, others edit their history liberally - all believe they are logical and often for 'the good of the epeople'.
So reducing it to emotional questions, demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of trying to impose America's version of rights into other environments and conversely the reverse:
Does ISIS have the right to come to your local schools and spread their message in the name of Free Speech? Should somebody from Syria lecture you about their ‘rights.'
Does Baidu have the right to publish results in the US that include misleading statements about corporations and stocks that have been pre-censored by it's government to encourage people to invest or subsidize Chinese industries? Should the US government require that type of information be removed or blocked? [BTW, I don’t think Baidu is wrong or evil, they are providing a service within the confines of their culture and legal system.]
In the end, who determines where the rights of one country intersect the rights of another? Don’t forget your ‘right to privacy’ from some foreign (or domestic) power.
Is the argument that evil, at any extreme, has the right to expression, in the name of free speech?
Does it follow then that you are willing to have the representatives from ISIS come to your local high schools and colleges and use their persuasive tactics to entice your neighbors and their children to massacre innocents in the name of some evil interpretation? Sleep well.
Why shouldn’t a country that has experienced an evil, magnitudes greater than ISIS, be allowed to determine what can, and what cannot, be said or distributed in its borders? [Remember, Americans think God gives them the right to pollute and police the world and everyone’s rights - it printed right on the dollar bill; “In God We Trust.”]
If you live in a country that interprets an eighteenth century individual ‘right', without taking 21st century technology into the equation, you are probably amongst the group that thinks some other 18th century ‘right’ also applies to 21st century weapons.
Fortunately only one country in the first world actually thinks that way. It’s also the same country with hundreds of religions that similarly interpret wisdom from preachers 2,000+ years ago as if nothing else has changed in the mean time. Those 'right thinking' people also control the dozens of states that allow Creationism to be taught as science, and they want their ‘rights' to have that interpretation included on national test standards. Twisted logic isn’t it?
Facebook operates and makes profit in many countries with limitations on information and the distribution of personal data. (China, Egypt, Dubai, Russia, India, EU etc.) they can and should respect German law in that country, or they should choose not to do business there. Easy. When Google couldn’t follow Chinese rules of censorship, they chose not to do business there. Today, Google’s principles have compromised the profit is more important than some ‘rights’.
There is no American ‘right’ to project its labyrinthine 18th century concepts into other countries where people consciously choose to limit the right of ISIS (or Nazis) to talk to their impressionable youth.
To paraphrase Zhou Enlai, "Let’s all check back in a hundred years and see if the American experiment continued to work.” No need for the rest of the world to follow them over a cliff.
Wow, an author from the online Atlantic needed a subject and found an intellectual from the Brookings Institute with an opinion on Silicon Valley. Better warn Apple before they spend a gazillion dollars in SV on a spaceship for their 25,000 employees. And Google, eBay, Oracle, HP, SalesForce.com, Microsoft (SV), Lockheed, the incubators, and Stanford need to get the memo... their 250,000 jobs will be in San Francisco and Oakland soon! And San Francisco better start building schools for their children..(BTW, S.F. is the largest school district in the country with a shrinking enrollment... the re-gentrification is raising prices so much that working and middle class are moving out.) These companies and the university create the spin-offs that attract the VC and the talent pool can't (and wouldn't) just up and move to Oakland, or Austin, or Chicago. The author mistakes regular seepage from Silicon Valley for a mass migration. Of course there are other opportunities and locales near S.V. and around the country, but for a long time the S.V. tech star will continue to have critical mass and to suck the majority of the VC funding into its orbit.
Every few years some academic looks at a growth spurt (like Pixar, Leap Frog and IKEA in a small town like Emeryville) and makes social and economic forecasts that can't be implemented in the real world. Then journalists assume that their academic degree validates the theory - and write these silly puff pieces.
How about next time we Spare the Electrons!
The French are doing this for the same reason the Americans are persecuting Julian Assange.
Of course the information about this base is out, and of course 500,000 counselor posts were published and can't be retrieved. But, by chasing Assange around the world and into obscure embassies, they make the next person think a little more about what they post on-line. They want the public spectacle of making someone that shares purported 'classified' information eat some dirt or look over their shoulder. Maybe it prevents them from publishing the address of a safe house in Benghazi.
JF
So we can print guns, and I'm sure bullets, but to make the bullets fly, something needs to explode in a little casing.. can a printer make the explosive?
Thanks
JF
Agreed, people don't have a right to parts or information from manufacturers, but I wouldn't mind a disclosure requirement on cameras, computers, TVs, appliances, et cetera, that cost over a certain amount, e.g. $500 or $1000.
Disclosure should cover that company's repair record on similar products and components, average cost of repairs and upgrades during the expected life of the product, shipping cost responsibilities, and whether external services are available or not allowed....
We end up shopping on price and features because the manufacturers get to hide the total cost of ownership. I'm surrounded by a Nikon camera, a Tivo and a kitchen full of 3 y.o. GE appliances that all have exorbitant repair costs for what should be minor repairs or scratches.
In less than three years, Jobs has sold 40 million iPhones and 40 million iPod Touches without multitasking, Flash or a camera for video conferencing.
Android and Xbox offer multitasking and Flash, buy them and quit complaining about features that 'pundits' think the product "needs."
Apple has kept its cutting edge products "closed" since 1984. Have you considered that possibly that is why they are where they are at ($38B in the bank), while other manufacturers from Osborne to Dell have ended up sucking air on the low margins that happen when they can't keep total vertical control over their products.
Android, in just its first year, is already showing signs of platform fragmentation and a competitive race to make the least expensive products. If you believe that model will win... buy some Motorola or HTC stock, they are pushing Android phones.
BTW: I do hope some company, maybe Google, can get its act together and make a competitive platform to challenge Apple's economy. Features and new paradigms from competition are the best way to compete with Apple. Continually copying and following another market defining company is not how Steve Jobs and Apple earned its position.
Well said. Now can you please explain this to those Supreme Court dudes that think "rights" were cast into stone in the 18th century. Cheers, Flack
Bring me your Gameboy in 2035, I'll salute it then!
Flack
Tell her what?
Some AP reporter who had to write a science article scared the beejeezuz out of you statistically challenged hypocondriacs?
RTFA, even it says that in surveying all the medical literature available, only two incidental reports of dogs with cancer associated with implants are found. There are a few million implanted dogs in this country! (It's been common practice at the vast majority of shelters to spay and implant for many years.) I asked my vet last year how many he has taken out - one was rejected out of hundreds he has done. He didn't mention cancer....
What about the mice? Mice seem to have a 10%, 4% or 1% cancer rate on chip implants (according to the article, which wasn't submitted to any scrutiny by anybody with a Phd, Masters or even a BS in biology from what I can tell.) Many simple causes haven't been investigated or at even discussed. (e.g. the chip may occupy 2-3% of the mouse' body mass, the same chip 0.1% of a dogs and 0.03% of a human (Carrie is petite after all.) Maybe there is a threshold where the immune system is overwhelmed. Get a grad student on it!
The article is poor science. Scare the old ladies with chipped dogs on Sunday morning (9/9) and get they're blood warming so they can do some more fear mongering on Tuesday.
Flack
Two of our three daughters went through the local middle school's (in the Bay area) lap top program. Lots of parental involvement and only interested teachers participated.
- Two of the girls are straight A, one B-, we've seen no evidence that the laptops effected their grades either way
- Half of the kids participated at a parental cost of $1800 for three years (iBook + extended warranty + software.) The warranty was used by nearly every student, nobody designs a consumer notebook that can be carried by a 6th, 7th or 8h grader in a backpack for three years. Also, $100 of each participant was used to supply the computers for less economically capable kids. They standardized on Mac so that everyone would be on OSX, 802.11, same software versions etc. Wouldn't have been as easy if parents wanted to substitute their "old but still working Dell." A few MS fans refused to play.
- Hardship on the teachers is converting lesson plans they were using for 10-15 years to Powerpoint, etc., and making them interactive. This naturally selected out the lazy teachers and some really good teachers that are just not technologists.
- At least 20% of the kids are children of immigrants, many with the first computer in the house (unless a parent has an H1 visa with a Silicon Valley company.) At least they are one the technology treadmill with the rest of us.
- Even though the school made modest claims of improved performance, I personally don't think the first 500 students are statistically significant enough to draw conclusions for the long view.
- Our school district (20+K students) is now 95% online: grades updated daily, homework, schedules, etc. Every student makes Powerpoints, CDs, videos for classwork. The kids with middle school experience have some small advantage, but I don't think it makes them smarter. But they seem to be moe competent in the tools they will need for life.
Some of our experience:
- Middle school is a great time to become computer literate, its helps to have the education system involved.
- In three of the first five years there were a total of four "porn" anecdotes reported. The school routers blocked IM ports and also used porn filters, nothing installed on the kids computers so that they could be used at home as easily as school.
- It would be nice if we could economically ruggedize notebooks for kids
- 80-90% of parents would certainly do it again, knowing the results. Most of the rest got frustrated that the computers just couldn't put up with all the drops.
- It takes at least a small cadre of dedicated teachers to make it work. The school board could not have dictated this as a solution to some perceived problem.
Conclusion: it would appear that if you have a problem school (or child) and you GIVE them a laptop, then you still have a problem, it just now has a laptop. i.e. Computers are not a cure or solution to any problem, but they probably are a technology that it is helpful to become skillful with as early as possible.
One sentence in a lame press release has been published up and down the industry from Yahoo to cNet. Checking MetaFacts website I can't find a meaningful data point to work with or justify buying their report. - Is it a flawed methodology? We can't tell anything from the quote... My wife and I have Macs (we're over 50), our three teenage daughters have Macs - how did they assign the units from my household? 5 owned by a 50+ ? - Is one data point relevant... then I'd pick University bookstores in the US (not ownership because it doesn't reflect a changing market share**) Apple and several Windows manufacturers provide great discounts. An anecdotal study (as my senior high school daughter and I visited over twenty campuses in the last 18 months) determined that 20-25% of the computers bought on campus are Macs, mainly not by engineering students. Those kids made their own choice, not the one required by an IT department, and they bought 4x-5x more Macs than Apple's market share (last I saw it was hovering around 5%) would indicate. That survey would say the future is bright for Apple. (I'm a skeptic though) - I've been in tech marketing for 20 years, have never bought a report from (or even heard of) MetaFacts - I spend more time laughing at the Gardner and Forester reports. I'm sure they are a reputable company, but their press releases make me wonder what they are thinking with their choice of subjects. Cheers, Flack ** Today's news said Toyota passed up Ford in unit sales last quarter. A comparable auto ownership survey would only indicate that a lot of old people own Fords and cast no light on the changing market share of Toyota.
The Cambrian period is named after a group of mountains (in Wales?); The St Peter Sandstone after a type of sandstone found near St Peter MO; maybe the anti native-American mascot people should write letters to the geologists that named the Oglala and Lakota formations in South Dakota and Wyoming after "indians"; etc. Pluton seems to be a good "type" name for similar sized planets based on the first sample that was identified. While it is fun to see the IAU get a big wedgie about this classification business, their categories (moon, planet, etc.) seem antiquated considering what we do know about solar systems. (Remember when taxonomy meant anything in water was a fish - a shell fish, a fish with mammeries?) Biology, in many cases has moved from superficial "does it have wings? It must be a bird" to cladistics - "What did it evolve from?" I agree with a previous writer who said future generations will laugh at our short term perspectives. Cheers, Flack?