Plans2Reality

Too Stupid to Live, Part Five

Speaking on the House floor, Rep. Jesse Jackson (D-Ill.) said Apple's popular tablet computer "is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble?" the congressman asked. "Just buy an iPad and download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine."

Jackson, the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, went on to cite a recent initiative at Chicago State University, which is in Jackson's congressional district, to give all incoming freshmen iPads for their studies.

"Well, what becomes of publishing companies then and publishing company jobs?" Jackson said. "What becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs will simply not exist."

 

Works for me. It should reduce de-forestation, as we stop killing tons of trees for paper....

Why Our Graduates Don't Get Jobs

University graduates complain that they cannot get jobs. This may be, in part, why.

Yale offers a course on how people with disabilities are portrayed in fiction:

“We will examine how characters serve as figures of otherness, transcendence, physicality or abjection. Later may come examination questions on regulative discourse, performativity and frameworks of intelligibility.”

 

And this when we learnt hat student debt in America exceeds credit card debt.

Potential buyers show little interest in Solyndra | CanadianBusiness.com

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — A California solar panel manufacturer that received a half-billion dollar loan from the federal government has been unable to attract much interest in its operations and now hopes to sell its assets piecemeal.

via www.canadianbusiness.com

Oh well......

The man behind Solyndra's rise and fall: Chris Gronet - San Jose Mercury News

When President Barack Obama visited Solyndra in May 2010, then-CEO Chris Gronet gave him a personal tour in what was the high point of the young startup's meteoric rise.

via www.mercurynews.com

Worth a read. THere's more to it, though.

Low-bucks computer for experimenters

Analysis Despite all the excitement and expectation encompassing the RaspberryPi, the most remarkable thing about this low-power credit card-sized computer is its price tag: little more than £20 for a fully functional system capable of, among many things, 1080p video playback and hardware-accelerated graphics.

via www.theregister.co.uk

This looks darned interesting!

A new genre of humor: the currency crisis joke.

 A Spaniard, an Italian and a Greek go into a bar. They drink until dawn.

Who pays the tab?

A German.

How Apple beat IBM in Steve Jobs' first retail war • The Register

You really want to read this article, and not just because it is pro-Apple. There are two excellent marketing points in it, and an example of why the even biggest company needs to be flexible enough to get something out the door in 48 hours - over a weekend.

The Golden Age of Computer Sales surely must have been Christmas 1984. The Macintosh had just been released, Compaq and IBM offered powerful new CPUs, but the real action was a massive Christmas sales battle between the Apple//c and the IBM PCjr. I remember it well, I was working at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I was at the very center of the battle.

via www.theregister.co.uk

Too blind to see cause and effect? Netflix, maybe....

Well, knock me over with a feather!

"Despite increases in gun sales, gun crimes continued to decrease in the United States for the fourth straight year in 2010, according to the FBI."

Sometimes people are so sure of their pre-conceptions that they truly cannot see contradictory data. 

This occurs in marketing communications a great deal - too often companies get so caught up in their own worldview that they cannot recognize the contrary data when they see it.

Netflix seems to have done that. Management made a series of choices that cost them an enormous chunk of their customer base. Even when confronted with millions of screaming customers, they did not back down very quickly. Stupid, stupid, stupid.....

Solyndra Panel Manufacturing Cost

Here's a graphic showing the consensus estimates of panel prices from 2008 to 2011:

And here's a snapshot of Solyndra's actual production cost. The key numbers: $30 million to run the plant for three months. The run rate was around 100K panels per quarter, or a little higher. So, we have panel costs around $300, panels prices around $200. Oh well.

It shows, though, that if panel prices had not dropped so far, so quickly, the Solyndra product would have been successful.

 

They need to work on their PR....

There's been a new leak of climate-research scientist emails, many of which do not seem to reflect well on the scientists. 

It's beyond the scope of this blog to debate the merits of all the research, but I will suggest that maybe these guys start using Skype to have these conversations. It won't leave a paper trail. For example:

Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones  - who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. 

'I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'

In another of his emails, he wrote: 'I’ve been told that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is above national Freedom of Information Acts. 

'One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.'

Perhaps he should have heeded his own advice....

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2066240/Second-leak-climate-emails-Political-giants-weigh-bias-scientists-bowing-financial-pressure-sponsors.html#ixzz1epnnpK5M

By Rob Waugh

via www.dailymail.co.uk