and actually you as well have taken the time to type out a response to something you think is "irrelevant"

You missed my point. You made "alot" the subject at hand, and the actual point you were trying to make on the topic became irrelevant. We're all talking about your spelling instead of whatever you were trying to say in the discussion.

If your desire is only to get noticed and get replies correcting your spelling, then saying "alot" a lot :) is a successful way of doing it. But if your desire is to get a good discussion on relevant topic going, as you say it is, then this isn't very good.

I make my words a bit grating precisely for that reason. I *want* people to pay attention...I am not making the same point everyone else has made. I **DO** believe we can all agree and move forward and I have had some very interesting conversations this way.

That doesn't make any sense. The conversation ended up being about spelling instead of your point, which is completely opposite from what you wanted it to be.

You don't make your words "grating" by misspelling them, you make them irrelevant... unfortunately.

Following that up with an argument that you did it on purpose certainly doesn't help your cause. It only leads it us even further astray from the topic.

What we need is for the protocol to be reverse-engineered

The "protocol" seems to be a simple POST with fields like "channel=32&antenna=no", etc.

That better not take too long to reverse-engineer.

You are ignoring the reality that people drive far more often than they skydive.

I was not ignoring it, I was addressing it head on. I believe that if it takes 100+ times of doing one thing vs. once of another thing to bring them into comparable death probabilities, then the thing you can do 100+ times is clearly safer.

People don't understand that most fatalities from skydiving involve stunts of some sort: hook turns, base jumping, wingsuits.

Not necessarily.

That calculation is completely flawed. You can't compare the lifetime chance of death for something that is done occasionally vs something that is done multiple times a day, and say that they are equally safe.

In 100,000,000 miles traveled, at least a few million trips were made, vs. 150,000 jumps. Clearly, getting into a car and driving to a destination is an order of magnitude safer than jumping out of a plane.

I've gone through this transition once before... now every manager has a budget that pays exactly enough for a bell-curve distribution of his small team.

Now you have a choice of reducing the bottom 10%'s raise by even more to give some of the previously "middle-ranked" employees a bigger raise, or you can take away from your best performers to bring the bottom 10% into the middle-ranked category. Because your team is small, both swings are rather large, and quite unfair.

You still can't win, because "borrowing" the budget from another manager goes back to the old stack-ranking horse-trading show of trying to determine whose team has better performers.

The only way around it is to have only VP-level budgets, and allow managers to assign any ratings they feel are correct, with some adjustment of expectations by their directory. Then, the VP spreads the larger budget accordingly.

It yields variable, but more fair, rewards.

Do you think for a moment that a manager would ever end up in the bottom 10% bucket? ... No, stack ranking systems like this exist to reinforce management's masters of the universe self-image.

I've worked in a place where the company was doing poorly and they were laying off the bottom 10% from performance reviews... Senior managers and directors were included in the 10%, even one of the VPs was slashed.

The stack ranking system is not a product of some management hive mind that helps managers -- in fact, most hate it. It's a product of the CEO, HR, and usually some business consulting company. Almost everybody else is worse off for it, including all levels of management below the top couple of tiers.

Clearly, if you believe an iPad or equivalent device is enough for you, you are clearly not the target audience. This isn't a stupid fashion statement/gimmick like an iPad - it has real uses and those who have a use for it knew it the moment they saw it. No single product is ideal for anyone - it's a matter of choosing what you need.

Ok, why do you have to throw that bit in? It's about choosing what you need, but if you choose an iPad then you're choosing a stupid gimmick. Way to believe in the rest of your words.

iPad has plenty of uses, they may not be "real" for you, but it's been selling too well and for too long to consider it a useless fad. People don't keep upgrading things they don't have a use for.

But your company broke the law by hiring you when an American could have done the job. They did so to save money, and it came at the cost of driving down the standard of living for everyone.

You assume a lot. First, the criteria isn't that some American could've done the job, that would've taken just about every possible job off the list. It that's you've made a *reasonable* effort to find one and you didn't. Even if there are plenty of Americans in other cities who don't want to move, or the same city but with jobs they don't want to leave, it's still ok to hire somebody on H1-B.

And, second, how do you know they got him cheap? Every computer engineering company I've worked at has been paying foreign visa employees the same salaries as local employees, and they had to deal with significant lawyer and visa expenses to get the work permits, and later applications for permanent residency. The H1-B has always been the least preferred option in hiring discussion because of all that extra work.

Not every company is Infosys, and not every job is for an app developer. There are plenty of high-skilled engineering jobs out there that stay open for over a year because of the shortage of qualified candidates, and real and honest companies need to fill them to continue to do business and grow.

Every tech company I've worked at had some kind of a version of "stack ranking", and some were dysfunctional and some functioned very well. I don't think stack ranking has anything to do with it... It's a simple math problem --- you have some amount of money to divvy up, and you have to identify the most important and most worthy people to spend the most on. I think most people understand that.

The alternative of giving everybody the same reward only works at the smallest companies where the general performance bell curve hasn't started to form.

Where things run into problems is when you allow politics, favours, and poor evaluation skills by managers determine your "stack locations", at which point you start creating resentment which fuels the next round of evaluations.

Nobody was asking about innovation in this particular thread. The question at hand is "why is microsoft's future in jeopardy?".

Metro might be innovative, but it's also driven the rest of my family away from laptops and Windows. We're back to the old days of sharing one desktop when heavy usage is needed, and non-Microsoft tablets and phones are used for everything else. That's not the direction they wanted to go in, I'm sure.

I've got two of them, and both have lousy wifi connections in two different parts of the house where other devices connect fine (including BoxeeBox right next to it).

I ran ethernet cables into both rooms, and now I'm happy with Roku... but I don't recommend it to anyone who can't get a wired connection.

6 weeks before the original iphone launched, Jobs said - no plastic screen, use gorilla glass - why? Because your keys in your pocket would scratch the screen. How many other executives would stop production to do that?

It wasn't 6 weeks. It was at least 6 months, maybe more. The story goes that he put the order sometime in 2006, before Gorilla Glass was even ready for production, and iPhone came out in June of 2007.

In places I've worked, executives stopped production all the time, for all kinds of reasons. The good ones were the one that saw the problems ahead of time and didn't have to stop anything, but adjust well before the production began. I believe that's what Jobs did in this case, too.

The EU prices include the sales tax (VAT), which is a bit over 20% in most EU countries. That's why they look worse than they are...

You're still getting screwed, but not just by the seller ;).