I've had it three days and love it. After the Palm Pre I don't think I could be excited about another slab phone. Pressing on a piece of glass is not well suited to human anatomy or kinetic pleasure. I love the Classic and also enjoy how much that angers everyone. From an Android dev.

>>If large companies are so bad why do we still buy their products and services?
Often we are forced to choose the lesser evil. And of course, I am in the vast minority, considering a company's behavior before my purchase.

>> It's too easy to point at successful people and call them liars, crooks and hypocrites
I acknowledge your opinion but I was addressing the question "do we have serious problems with organizational leadership ?" I included a link to research that seems to confirm what many have felt for a while.

>>At the end of the day the biggest hypocrite is the one that continues to buy their products.
You make a good point. If everyone shopped like me there would be less of a problem. But looking at developmental studies that is not likely to happen soon. So should I abandon any attempt to improve the system ? I say no.

What is success ? Making money at any cost ? Producing defective games ? Telling your production engieers to shut up when the yields are below 50% ? Blaming the customer when the DVD reader design scratches the expensive games ? Using loopholes to extort small businesses ? Lying to congress ?

The root of the problem is not just corporations, it is pretty much all large organization structures. Movement to the top is usually the result of being good at politics, or mentally ill. (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2013/10/are-ceos-and-entrepreneurs-psychopaths-multiple-studies-say-yes/) Neither of which will direct a corporatiion to benefit both stockholders and customers.

Maybe one hundred years from now, those in positions of authority will get extra scrutiny, as they should, and be assesed for narcissm, psycopathy. The company I work for is still reeling from misadventures of the previous CEO. I sensed a serious problem the day I first met him, and every time after that.

>> Prove it.

My claim: Two o'clock comes before 5 o'clock.
Two o'clock: when concentration problems start with no noots
Five o'clock: when concentration problems start with noots
Tested daily. Of course you do not have phenomenological access to my mind.

Proof that this is somewhat related to Limitless ? Well you can watch the movie and see if you agree.

On Reddit you will see many people who use noots test themselves regularly on Lumosity or the Stanford tests, to try to rule out placebo effect, which is important.

No, it is 800mg piracetam capsule, then in my morning Atkins shake I add 250mg Alpha GPC (choline - vitamin B) and 30mg Noopept. Reddit has a good Nootropics section. This stuff helps me concentrate longer and better, Check it out. Kind of related to the movie Limitless.

That the wild ass speculation at the end is given equal footing with a formal study ? Having had a couple of mini-strokes, and having a job that mostly involves concentration, this topic is of interest to me. I can say that adderall (took it a couple of times) and my nootropic cocktail definitely help.

It is annoying how many fundamentalists.there are on here. Intelligent only in the cognitive domain. Science requires agnosticism. Engineering requires pessimism.

I grew up drinking the stuff. Living in the Ohio River / West Virginia area, we would get these warnings that local chemical industries had accidentally spilled carbon tet into the Ohio River. We were told to boil the water. I was suspicious, I thought, either boiling doesn't separate the carbon tet, or it does, and we are all standing in our kitchens breathing it.

The town I grew up in had to dig up 18 inches of dirt, process the dirt, and put it back. I think it was paid for by Superfund.

I am considering buying some embedded board for the guitar effect purpose. While I am familiar with Linux audio recording, I am new to these embedded boards. What kind of latencies does this have ? I want to try to build a multiband distortion, kind of like the Source Audio Multiwave, except more voiced like a TS9, and friendlier to single coils. I hate the nasty sound of too much blocking distortion, typically caused by allowing too much low frequency into the initial distortion stage. I used to configure my Vetta to simulate dual band, and it was awesome.

you realize how much time you spend positioning your finger over that little square icon on Android. I think the Palm Pre was what first got me using gestures. Been using the Blackberry Z10 for a year now and love it. FWIW my day job lately is mostly coding on Android. I don't understand why so many people want a monoculture of phones. Definitely not wise.

>> Private companies that are bad at support go under.

Hmmm. The large companies I have worked for have been some of the worst. Your idea would mean that people shop based on how they are treated, and sadly that does not appear to be the case. I will restate my assertion that some of these problems are endemic to all kinds of organizations. For every govt inefficiency, I can point to a case of corporate malevolence.

Very good point. But that doesn't mean we don't try and work on it. I am very close to one of these situations, I smelled it a mile away. I'm not the only one. So it is not impossible to make some progress in this area.

I don't doubt what you are saying. But if you are trying to argue that organizational dysfunction occurs only in government structures, I cannot agree with that. I hope a time will come when all organizations (corporations, governments, churches, etc) are required to yearly examine their leadership and have them pass a test for narcissism / psycopathy. I think this is at the root of much organizational dysfunction that not just makes mistakes, but celebrates the mistakes and takes pleasure in the needless suffering they cause.

I learned pretty quickly that the engineers skilled in making customers go away looked better when management did their metrics. Sometimes there were complicated problems (customer building a custom PCB made an error in assigning IRQs or memory mapping error). Customers figured out to ask for me specifically, which did not help my metrics. It is really a shame when companies design their process to make people fail. What an effin mess.

Yea, the guy that wore a shirt...

Hmmm. Do you find yourself occasionally having to re-learn your address or phone number ?