In part because we have significant experience and therefore patience with sucky technology. That's due to both the fact we grew up with technology as the technology got better, and because some of our key experiences (Windows, for example) sucked so badly.

Those might be my only 2 choices in our new home.

dave

Well, (1) widely distributed decision-making has real problems with ensuring everyone has reasonably enough information to act rationally in a timely basis; (2) then an assumption that people act rationally in aggregate. The two very large scale distributed decision-making examples I can think of are (a) stock markets and (b) elections. It's going to be damn hard to argue the value of large scale distributed decision making from -those- two examples.

Any optimization approach/algorithm is set up to maximize the value of its utility function. Consider two utility functions for getting from "A" to "B", 'fewest miles' or 'fastest'. A direct route that takes you down 10 miles of roads at a speed limit of 30 MPH, compared to 20 miles on an interstate at 65 MPH, will win under the first utility but not under the second.

The same thing holds true for public policy. Do you want "most lives saved?" Do you want "greatest economic output?" Do you want "Least tax burden?"

So independent of any other consideration, there is huge judgement and therefore huge variation when trying to conduct 'rational policy' by what you choose as your utility function.

AV software should meet the standards for medical treatments, following the virus analogy. First, they should be clearly shown to be 'safe' - to not cause problems on the machine or introduce new vulnerabilities. Second, they should be shown to actually stop known viruses, be able to react to new infections, and in general do a better job than the OS vendor in rapidly adapting to threats.

Frankly, on Mac OS, I don't think any product meets these standards.

They laughed all the way to the bank! I'm old enough to remember this (and was living in Mass at the time). This issue became an instant classic, and they got -tons- of press coverage.

One of the great parody ads: http://www.funnyfakeads.com/pi...
And the background for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"Agile" is -whatever you want it to be-, and that's part of my problem with it. There's no real normative definition that can be used to distinguish 'agile' from 'not-agile.' And whenever you push back at 'agile' asserting it is not meeting its promises, you get told "you're doing it wrong."

So at the end of the day, "agile" means not having to do anything you don't want to do (see 'technical debt')
 

So you believe that the one control is roughly 1/3 the cost of the entire product? If we take away marketing, retail mark-up, etc, that could put a $180 part to at least 50% of the cost of the drier (which has a motor and drive parts, the rotating drum with bearings, 3 other controls, the external housing, assembly, shipping, etc, etc, etc.)

For the truck, the parts are probably environmentally qualified, so that makes them more costly than the stuff from Fry's.

But the cost for safety design and certification -are already paid for- in the product. There's no justification for trying to recoup engineering costs for subsequent repair parts.

There is carrying cost for repair parts. If the item cost $5 to make, I don't expect to buy it for $5, due to inventory costs, transportation costs, etc.

So no, I don't accept that the cost of either of these two items is at all reasonable, even factoring in safety and environmental qualifications. (I've worked on safety-critical and embedded vehicle projects, as well as inventory control systems where we had to calculate carrying costs as part of the 'reorder point' calculation, so I claim some specific domain experience.)

With respect to Apple, they have set a specific market. If that's not your market, OK, go elsewhere.

The mechanical timer broke on my (gas) drier. The part cost $180, for a drier that probably cost $500-$600.

The cost for the ABS (computer) module on my 2000 Nissan Frontier was $1.8k.

Will we legislate 'reasonable prices' for repair parts? And who determines 'reasonable'? (Same argument goes for other aspects of 'repairability'.)

"To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" by Henry Petrosky http://www.amazon.com/Engineer...
We learn much more from failure.

"The Design of Design, Essays from a Computer Scientist" by Frederick Brooks http://www.amazon.com/Design-E...
This isn't as well known or quite as easy to read as "Mythical Man-Month."

Both of these books should take you outside of 'pure coding' into thinking about the systems the code is part of, and how those systems interact with humans and with other systems.

And then what? You cannot snail-mail the file. It had to be electronically submitted.

The problem with that was there is no mechanism to -submit- the resulting PDF except through Adobe Acrobat. That's the real flaw!

(And if that did work, one could just grab the form via screen capture.)

Last year (2014), I had to download Adobe Acrobat to submit a form to the US Treasury dept. The only way you could do this was Acrobat, it used PDF and Adobe proprietary form submission. (I couldn't use Apple Preview.app to fill out the form.)

This year (2015), Treasury added the obvious alternative, a fully on-line Web form. I guess that's progress.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/24...

Jeans and black shirt. But then, how many industries exist based on copying Apple's design chops?