The main issue is that no one seems to agree on what to measure. "Student performance" is too fuzzy. Does that mean "proficiency"? Well, that's straightforward. But then you have problems graduating students who never become proficient, and it points out just how unfair society is. No one likes that! No one has created a metric that gives all parties an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling for all parties, that is very true.
It was "commercially viable", but so were it's plethora of competitors. The clones took over the world (except for maybe education and the Mac's eventual niche markets).
However, workers can undertake actions to increase their bargaining power and thus wages, as can any other supplier. [...] is no different than any economic transaction
It is different, because of the official governmental support worker-unions enjoy — instead of being treated with the anti-trust laws, like any other entity working to raise the prices of what its members are selling.
Except, unlike a group of producers acting in concert to exert market power; an employer still has many other options for labor. They can outsource, refuse to sign a contract and bring in replacements, move to another non-union location; unlike a monopoly where there is no other source of the product. Granted, those are not easy things to do but hey still are viable competitors to a union workforce. The government has intervened in the workplace in many ways, sometimes to the workers favor (unions, labor laws) and other times to the employers (non-competes, right to work laws,letting bankruptcy abrogate contracts and pension liabilities).
That's cheating.
And inside, a modern x86 processor is actually a giant hardware emulation of x86 instructions with a RISC/VLIW core... You call it cheating, and I call it optimizing.
They second you try a cool trick like migrating a thread to another machine...
But this would happen with a macrokernel as well... you can't just magically make networking overhead disappear...
I wasn't intending on saying that CISC was superior to RISC... what I was more saying is that there has been more money put into CISC processors, and so they develop faster.
It's just a simple fact of money == better access to stuff to make more money.
The main reason CISC is faster today is probably more related capital investment needed in production. Intel just have so much more.
This was basically what I was trying to say. More capital investment typically means better outcomes.
Openly documented does not mean you were allowed to clone it. Compaq had to reverse engineer the PC BIOS using engineers who had never looked at the BIOS. These engineers wrote a spec that a separate set of engineers then had to implement. It was very costly and laborious and resulted in a landmark court victory for Compaq.
Standardized testing as a grading mechanism for teachers doesn't fix anything.
I don't know if that is true or not, but I haven't seen teachers themselves propose an objective criteria for measuring their performance.
The responsibility of school is not to provide a supplement or replacement for bad parenting.
Reality disagrees with you.
With my kids it has been let the schools teach what they can, then spend the time to actually really teach them things properly and fill in the large quantity of gaps left by teaching to the test.
Yes, for financial and social reasons we would like to use the public schools. The tradeoff is a whole lot of teaching at home.
The work you do with your kid is impressive! Keep it up!
If that is the reality, then we should change the system to reflect the reality. If we are, in effect, babysitting the kids then let's do it right. These kids are all of our problems when they "graduate" or otherwise leave school with no skill except going to prison.
The main thing I see in Atlanta is a poor incentive system that assumed teachers would be more honest than the population at large, which obviously was a shitty assumption.
Yes, none of the numbers make any sense at all. That is, it's a perfect public education budget item.
At least the pediatrician is somewhat constrained by organizations which do (mostly) adhere to the scientific method. FDA drug trials, peer-reviewed articles, etc. But yeah, there is still a lot of guessing going on. To be fair, they can't really run a controlled experiment on an individual patient, so they have to do some guessing.
IBM once created an open platform
They didn't create an open platform - the platform was "opened" for them by Compaq, and IBM saw a threat. Microsoft, on the other hand, saw an opportunity and happily licensed their code to all comers.
Market share is not as important as "profit share". This is true for both device makers and App developers. Apple matters very much, with only 20% market share by unit but 89% by profit. On the app front, Apple paid out $10 billion to developers last year while Google paid out $7 billion.
So yes, they still are relevant.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker