...and as I recall, the guy who founded and ran NeXT was someone who not only was an Apple founder but came back to Apple later, as well. Ended up being pretty important at Apple, too, I think.

No, no, his name's right on the tip of my tongue...give me juuuuust a second...

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

It'll never touch your settings again!

Also, it's incredibly poorly designed, and they won't take patches that fix things.

Indeed. When were online ads ever "fun and informative?"

The phone may be powerful enough but you need an OS to match. In that sense, MS perhaps had the right idea to converge their mobile and desktop OS, even if they did it in a horrible way. At some point we'll see devices that work in 2 modes: a non-multitasking one (or with limited multitasking), geared towards small screens and touch input when running on the portable device, and a multitasking mode geared towards large screens and separate input devices, for when the phone is docked on the desktop. Merely adding a keyboard and mouse to an iPhone / iPad is going to be crap.

And thanks to better processors, a little proliferation doesn't matter that much to consumers either. Modern GPS chips already support both GPS and Glonass, and will support Galileo as well when that goes up.

That's what is being taught in business school. Actually, it's a few things. "It's bad to have your company depending on a single person", which is true. "Standardizing jobs / positions makes it easier to shift people around, making you less dependent on any one of them, and makes recruitment and organizing the work easier if you do this in line with the rest of your industry", which is also true to a degree. Never mind the many negative effects of standardizing jobs; the message to take away from this is not that people are drop in replaceable parts. If you did all this correctly, it'll be easier to replace a leaver, but it doesn't mean that replacing one person doesn't come at a high cost, and doesn't mean that adding or replacing many people at once is still extremely hard to do without messing up the works.

Sadly I see my share of managers who do get the idea that people can be swapped in and out at no cost. Needless to say their teams are not the high performers.

It's interesting what Cisco is becoming.

A decade, even half a decade, ago, Cisco was greatly admired for their ability to acquire without attrition. When a company acquired another company, you usually saw 10-12% attrition in the first 6 months, after the pay-for-stay for key personnel expired, and another 8-10% at the end of 12 months. That meant that between 18% and 22% of what you just bought had walked out your door in your first year.

Cisco's numbers were 2% and 5% for 6 and 12 months, respectively. Cisco knew how to do an "acquihire", and keep the talent that it bought the company for, and in acquisitions which weren't simply talent plays, it knew how to do that too.

It seems that this expertise has been lost along the way, or that in one of these annual "transformations", something broke. Either way, with the way they are acting like IBM Global Services these days, or perhaps the post acquisition EDA or post-divestiture Agilent, they are unlikely to be able to repeat their past successes in acquisition, since the trust has been lost.

Which is really a shame, since they were the envy of the entire tech industry for their capability in this regard, not just Silicon Valley. We used to have meetings at IBM about how we could possibly do what they did, with the numbers they got, and thus avoid killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Similar meeting took place at Apple, particularly prior to the acquisition of P.A. Semi (and much of the team deserted Apple for places like Google anyway, after the lockout handcuffs were removed so that the people who were there prior to the acquisition could cash out and skedaddle.

It's interesting what they are becoming, because it's not the old Cisco; it most resembles, if I had to pick a company and an era, the post Carly Fiorina H.P.; here's hoping it doesn't turn out the same for them, and that they can correct their course before the rudder falls off entirely.

Ah yes. Making the asshole tormentor show up at her house to intimidate by his presence in person. That has generally fixed all my problems, knowing that the bully knows where I live, so as soon as the parents are not constantly riding herd on the little asshole, he and a couple of his friends can break into the house, shit on a plate, write a note, and leave it in the fridge.

Some people don't count as human beings, and despite the best efforts of their parents to program them to be human beings, the little psychopaths are unfixable. Yeah, that's also politically incorrect in this day and age where the fault is always external to the human exhibiting the bad behaviour.

You don't need to be computer literate to verify that paint is gone from a wall and/or painted over. You keep assuming that the parents are not only computer literate, that they are *more* computer literate than little Timmy, such that little Timmy couldn't pull a fast one on the old parents.

That's just not the case, in the majority of circumstances.

If by "stirring up trouble", you mean "not allowing Arab countries who deny the right of Israel to exist as a nation-state to destroy Israel without giving Israel aid", how about we don't, and they instead just agree to quit shooting at Israel, and Israel agrees to quit shooting back?

The problems with taking this article to mean what Lamarckism people would dearly love for it to mean are:

(1) It applies to memories, not to morphological traits; Lamarckism is specific to inherited morphological traits on the basis of environmental pressures.

(2) "it may give the sheen of respetability" - a "sheen" is not the same thing as actually being respectable, and "may" is not the same as "does".

Come back with a multigenerational study that demonstrates a change in morphology (such as those Dr. John Legler was attempting, and failed to demonstrate, with Chelodina Longicolis in the early 1980's), and we can perhaps revisit the subject.

And Lamarckism is still thought impossible.

This is actually two bets, isn't it? One is that I live to be 93. Not terribly likely.

OK, you're on. Not that $10,000 is likely to be worth as much in 2050.

Let's make a bet then. You pay me $1 if there is no credible commercially utilized cold fusion by 2024. I'll pay you $10,000 if there is. And please don't bother me until then.