Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to BenWilson,
Similarly, I have to wonder what the Soviets might have achieved if there hadn’t been the Cold War for 40 years.
For that to work you have to posit a Stalin-free Russia, and then WWII goes in very different directions, and with a different WWII...this is a very fun game, expressed beautifully in a growing body of fiction, but at the end of the day you still get left with "But what if?"
-
Hard News: Where are the foreigners?!, in reply to Amy Gale,
I even have an "alien number", to go along with all my other UIDs. It has nine digits - I guess they are planning for the volumes that will eventuate if aliens from other planets start wanting to get in on the non-stop party that is interacting with USCIS.
My status as a "non-resident alien" does entertain me, in that it makes it sound like my association with the US entails the occasional drop-by visit in my flying saucer, but the attendant paperwork does not.
-
Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Either that or we must figure out a way of teaching management to behave differently.
To do that you'd need a way to make the consequences for management relative to the long-term, rather than the short-term, results of a company, because you're right - it's really hard to lay the finger on individuals for doing what made most sense for them (and their companies) *at the time*, but overall and over time was disastrous. And that's hard to regulate. Making corporations (and boards) liable for their failings in more serious ways than relatively small fines would be an excellent start.
-
The first makes you a worthy philanthropist who came unstuck, the second an Evil Manipulator, right?
Both make you culpable. The trouble with the banking crises is that they are emergent properties; you have thousands if not millions of people who weren’t knowingly doing anything wrong, but it added up to massive problems. Then, of course, there are the people who knew exactly what they were doing.
“Hang the bankers” isn’t a useful response, but it’s still absolutely true that the banking and financial systems screwed up bigtime, that most of it was predictable, and that some people actively profited off it. Conspirators they may not have been, but they’re not exactly scapegoats, either.
I don’t blame banks too much for exploiting these arrangements for profit – that’s what they do.
When discussing American corporate bodies, it's always crucial to remember that American law dictates that their primary objective must be maximisation of profits for shareholders. Boards can be sued if they can be proven to have done things they knew would make profits smaller. It's not a peverse incentive per se, but it's tailor-made to inflate bubbles.
-
Hard News: Where are the foreigners?!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Bah I hate that word I always get it wrong :).Awful, bad, terrible even
It inspired terror in you? ;) (English is, er, terrible for relatively recent word-meaning changes like that. It's like people are trying to make it difficult, or at least wilfully mis-interpretable.)
-
Hard News: Dropping the Bomber, in reply to DCBCauchi,
Arthur C Clarke speculated on life already there under the ice of one of the moons. Can’t wait to find out.
Give me a few billion dollars and I'll find out for you. (Mars is a cheaper and better bet, though.)
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Martin Lindberg,
I came to Apple through Linux. In the 90-ies I spent a lot of my time at work with Unix, so Linux was a bit of a geek hobby at home. Windows was always my desktop environment at work and (unfortunately) it still is. I had absolutely no interest in the Macs of the day using the old MacOS. It wasn’t till OS X came along that I began to pay attention.
One change I do really appreciate over the last decade in computing is that you can migrate basically the same suite of software around the three major OS systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) and retain a large portion of the user experience even if the OS isn't your fave. I moved from Windows to Linux and back in different labs at work, and my day-to-day user experience was nearly seamless once I had my software of choice installed.
Apple really grasped, before others did, that it was controlling the apps - even more than the OS - that would keep users. Their walled garden is problematic, but they basically offer too good an experience and are too far ahead of anyone else for it to be a turn-off, yet.
What I also really remember, now, is how disparaging people were about so many of Apple's hits when they came out. The iPod touch wasn't different enough, the iPhone was too glitchy, the iPad was just a big iPod touch. But they worked, and they sold, even to people who'd moaned about them. That's genius.
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to John Holley,
"Apple Envangelist"
Your job was to make people envious of Mac owners, I take it.
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Islander,
(I had the first model all-in-one earlier, but that was my sole iMac disaster - it kept shutting itself down. 3 free service&repairs didnt solve the problem. It's sulking in my mother's wardrobe while I ponder dismemberment....
The one solid rule I do have with Apple products is to never buy the first model of any new product of theirs. Generally their stuff is pretty reliable, but when they have first-model issues, they have issues. That's what happened to my iBook.
(I did of course break this into little pieces with the iPad, but, eh, taking the blame for that sort of thing is what my partner is for.)
-
I was brought up on Macs - my father recycled all his work computers through home, from the Mac Plus to the LC 575 and then the I and eMacs - and I couldn't understand why anyone would bother with a Windows computer until I left home and had to start buying them myself.
For work-related reasons it's unlikely I'll ever go back to Macs, but the iPod/iPad family of devices are simply so far ahead of all the other options in that area - when you consider usability, software ecosystem, and specs together - I can't imagine migrating to another tablet/music system. Jobs' Apple has fundamentally shaped how I grew up with computers, and they've kept raising the bar. I recognize I've been lucky to have the wherewithal to keep getting Apple products - you do pay a premium - but it's been worth it. I really hope the company keeps that spirit going.