In other words, he was unable to anticipate that Apple would be able reduce the price of the iPhone, like they did with the iPod?
1,632 karma · joined July 4, 2010
Giving up the consumer market to focus on business puts this dominance in danger (even more so than the mobile/tablet threat), because someone might very well and up doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to the minicomputer makers, and eat their business "from the bottom up".
So I think the interesting question is whether Microsoft could survive and thrive on enterprise software/services in an environment where neither Windows nor Office were dominant.
Popular opinion might change, but as we've seen laws can change much more quickly, and even things that most people would consider normal could become a punishable offense.
At that point, for the people who already have the data on their lives out there, it will be too late to do anything about it, while the people who have been smart enough to live "perfectly normal" lives with the correct political and religious views, or those who can hire people to cover their tracks, will be better off.
If for instance gays and atheists are exposed as "deviants" in the media, but corruption and hiring prostitutes are downplayed as something "every politician is doing", then it doesn't really matter who shares what: The openly gay, atheist politician will have a hard time (and perhaps be put in prison) while the corrupt ones walk free.
I think the more ambitious the project is, and the less actual production experience the founders have, the more likely they are to run into problems. So that should be a big consideration when backing a project.
Again, sounds very fishy. I would expect a more methodical approach from a security researcher.
Seems like trolling or some form of paranoia.
That a piece of software is widespread and works good most of the time simply can't be used to say whether the software is "safe". To say anything about that, you have to look at the process used to develop the software, and see whether that process has a good success rate of predicting and uncovering software bugs.
If Toyotas code is as bad as this article makes it out to be and the certification standards are so poor, I won't be surprised if we see more cases like this in the future, although they will still be rare.
Certainly Microsoft should have the ability or money to optimize those drivers for maximum battery efficiency.
and here:
http://askakorean.blogspot.no/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-a...
Put it simply, Gladwell seems to form a theory, then find enough facts to support that theory. But that's not the way to do proper research.
In this case, had he actually consulted with pilots, koreans, and finally korean pilots, he might have ended up with a different conclusion (let alone now have made so many trivial errors in the text).
He could also have compared accident statistics and looked at how many accidents could be attributed to poor CRM in different countries. But again, he didn't do that.
He mentions that CRM training is used nowadays in all airlines (to improve crew collaboration) but fails to mention that the accident that sparked the focus on CRM (the worst airline accident of all time) was caused by a Dutch captain, from a country with a low power-distance index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster)
So I think the feeling was not so much jealousy, but more that they didn't compete fairly. Especially in the Linux world (where Greenspun was from), and more so after the Halloween documents leaked.
That feeling was even more pronounced in 1998, when Microsoft dominated computing and it seemed like _any_ attempt to do it big in software would either have to mean getting bought by, or killed by the sheer hugeness of Microsoft.
Nowadays Gates has set up a huge charity, and Microsoft has stumbled on so many things that we kind of feel bad for them instead.
Not sure how well it works, though.
That said, I think Apple has done a pretty good job of being respectful of privacy. You are asked explicitly whether to share information (location services etc) and you can always say no. Compare this to the latest Ubuntu release where your local file searches are being sent to Amazon as a default feature.
A cool hardware project might be to take a micro Linux ARM board with LVDS display output, mount it inside the CD bay in my laptop and make an internal LVDS switch to quickly switch between OSX and the Linux board. That would be pretty much ideal. :)
If you're an advanced user (as all of the readers here would probaby be), you'll quickly end up in the situation you describe.
- Focus follows mouse without auto-raise - Instant switching between virtual desktops (not possible to disable the animation in OSX last time I checked) - Instantly open a new terminal window with intelligent window placement in the currently active virtual desktop.
Since these turned out to be a hassle in OSX, I've just gradually stopped using them, and resorder to a single desktop paradigm with more mouse clicking for navigation. All in all I feel like I'm working slower in OSX than in Linux.
However, the major problem with Linux is the looks and a host of small nice details that OSX just gets right. Instant search in Spotlight including Mail, I've grown accustomed to the Mail app (Thunderbird search is ridiculous compared to Mail.app, for instance), Time Machine, and a few other apps like 1Password.
If I could get a virtualization scheme where I could have one desktop with OSX and 3-4 desktops of Linux, that would be ideal. But I don't think that's possible with Parallels or VMware, and I'm not sure how well OSX would run virtualized under Linux.
Second, it's not that he exaggerates something, but often he's flat-out wrong. The fascination he sparks is the "oh, that's an unlikely fact I wouldn't have believed was true, had it not been for the fact that these science studies cited here proves it."