M&M sorting machine
 

In his spare time this gentleman has come up with a decent M&M sorting machine

Why didn't I think of that.

What a collasal waste of time

I think that is the point.

Could be the foot in the door at a manufacturing tooling company. Somebody has to build all the automated equipment at factories.

Unfortunate for this inventor, it's been there and done that and patented already.

The re-cycling of glass bottles and jars by breaking them into small bits,
and separating the bits by color using a stream of air as they are in free-fall.

I saw that cranberry sorting is done the same way, essentially.

That M&M machine is all kinds of fucked up.

It's not sorting out the W's.

Some people are never satisfied.

If he had wanted to sort out the W's too,
he would have named it a M&W machine

But it could be easily adapted to work for Skittles as well.

Or Reese's Pieces.

I know a guy named Reece. We call his kids (6 of them!) Reece's Pieces.:D

I didn't see the dark brown or light brown M&Ms. I saw blue ones...which are toxic waste ones.

FLAWED.

Maybe knowing his W&Ws are being sorted will allow him to hold a job.

Colossal. Colossal. Huge. Large. Girthy. Immense.

But it was probably fun to do

Many who have no idea how innovation happens have identified themselves here. Why would anyone spend massively on scientists to make a computer chess game? Especially when a phone company does not play chess or do anything related to chess? Especially when the company's products and equipment did nothing with computers?

What resulted was UNIX (also called SCO, Ultrix, POSIX, Xenix, BSD, Linux, AIX, Windows, OSX) and C Programming language (and its many variants). Because what is done in fundamental research has zero potential value until application research then takes that discovery into a product.

Why would anyone spend so much money on research application of minerals? Because what resulted is the so many tapes and glues that we use today (3M). Why would anyone spend so much time developing a virus that can enter and compromise human cells? Because that now is suddenly how stem cell and peptide research may be curing diseases.

Why would anyone buy the rights to a useless video recorder that costs $20,000 to make. Because what resulted was the $multi-million VCR and DVD market. Ampex management had no idea what they were giving away for peanuts. They were business school graduates who could not see potential in ridiculous and money wasting ventures.

Is pattern recognition is easy? Just because one feels it is easy means any computer programmer can replicate it? Of course not. Pattern recognition is a hot field of study because it is so hard. Doing it on a pathetic computer inside a phone with such speed is a challenge.

Intel had no idea that a microprocessor could become a computer. Computer was not even listed in the hundreds of potential uProcessor applications. So why are all computers now based in uProcessors? It took 20 years to discover a uProcessor's most important task was computing. Was that obvious back then? Of course not.

That is what innovation is about. Discovering a problem to solve by first creating a solution ... that has no apparent purpose.

Appalling is how many did not even see what should be obvious. Characteristic of a business school graduate is one who does not know how innovation happens. Who cannot see what appears rediculous may be the innovator's dilemma. And does not realize it takes maybe 1000 such projects to create the one massive breakthrough. These who do not recognized how innovation happens is a primary reason for so many job losses.

TW,

You should go to business school these days. They have an entire curriculum based upon innovation and startups. I took one of those classes. It was taught by a former Ensoniq executive. We went over what made Commodore succeed in detail (the engineering team there was all ex-C= engineers who designed the C= 64). We talked about how to properly finance companies, and how to determine the success or failure of a product. We also talked about how being an entrepreneur is serial, and how most ventures will fail. We also talked a lot about sensitivity testing and pivots.

There's many reasons why to invest, and why not to invest in product development. While I cannot stop some MBAs from opening their mouths, and in class I really wanted to do that a lot to a certain few, there is solid logic and reasoning behind it.

It's a different place than what it was 10-20 years ago. MBA-based thinking before was not focused on creativity, innovation, or strategy. It sure is now.

I am 48 credits into my MBA at Temple. 6 more to go then I become yet another MBA in IT.

Bigger Commodore story was why it failed. A famous bumper sticker read, "Will Rogers never met Jack Tramiel." Tramiel learned enough to realize electronics were replacing mechanical office equipment. So he did try to advance with the times. But he had two problems. One was an ongoing war with his primary investor Gould. The other was his finance dominated management style where only he could approve any expensive greater than $1000. Innovators could not be trusted.

Tramiel appears to demonstrate what happens with age. He became more entrenched; enhanced his micromanagement style. This resulted in Atari's downfall. A shame really since Atari's intent was to do something similar what PlayStation and Xbox are doing today. Those promises never happened.

What is sensitivity testing and pivots?

What or who does this course cite as the current innovators of our time? And why?

tw, as usual, your main agenda is trolling. Your first impulse is to cast judgement on others. one can only assume it's done in order to make yourself feel better. see how insightful I am? see how dull and average the rest of you are?

cock

Commodore
 

TW,

The whole reason for Commodore's success was that they could make computers more cheaply than anyone else. They did in 4 chips what other companies did in 6. Because they owned MOS Technologies, they were vertically integrated and could make their own chips, further driving down the costs. They also cut costs by not investing in development or training programs for their resellers, instead offloading much of it to third parties, thereby cutting the costs even further.

Very low costs of goods sold and lowered selling and general administrative expenses (you can't expense many of these programs per unit). That's exactly why Commodore succeeded. They were beyond cheap when it came to production and offloaded everything to dealer networks. Ensoniq was (mostly) the same way.

Commodore was competing on price with several companies at the time, and was selling in the middle of a video game crash.

They failed because they kept that mindset when companies were buying computers by the truckload, and instead of investing in what the market wanted, which was a better support model and IBM compatibles, they kept pushing out the same ten year old chips on incompatible platforms, and made no investments or development in selling to businesses or higher than bottom dollar consumers. Dell, Compaq, and others cleaned their clock there, while the resurgent video game systems took out the low end.

The best examples of innovators were:

Intel, who has constantly reinvented itself over the years with chip design as processes changed.
Apple, who also reinvented themselves and acquired NeXT as part of the process.
Dropbox, who used analytics to test out product features and offerings
Google, who develops and constantly evaluates new product offerings

Definitions:

Sensitivity Analysis = conducting small tests of new product offerings on select communities to determine probability of success/failure
Pivot = When one takes a look at the original mission of the company, notices that it will not succeed as intended, and redirects it in a different, hopefully more successful, direction

If you want to stay in touch....Facebook. I hardly use this anymore and get UT and classicman on my feed anyway there.

Speaking of companies that have already begun their decline... ;)

Aaaaand I've just unfriended you on FB

As I am going to be doing soon to all ex-Dwellars.

Dance with the one that brung ya.

that's not how this works. that's not how ANY of this works!

Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Decline usually is due to factors such as cost controls that stifle the only reason for growth (innovation). Or a disruptive innovation (ie Innovator's Dilemma) that blindsides a company (the reason for a pivot).

A perfect example of pivot was when they spent all night showing Bill Gates the internet. He had no idea it existed. Like DEC, Microsoft was dooming itself into bankruptcy. Gates did something that only true business leaders can do. In but a few years, he pivoted Microsoft to address this disruptive innovation.

If FB must pivot, what is a disruptive innovation that threatens it existence?

- David Rossi.

Is it acceptable to plagiarize someone if that someone is a fictional character?

teh Cellar community

People who spew politics on social media.

How Anonymous Revolutionized Revolt
http://www.mintpressnews.com/anonymo...revolt/200200/

The problem is that Facebook doesn't make a real product, they merely sell ourselves back to ourselves. Their only room for innovation is to make that process more ubiquitous and addictive. In that way they are a lot like the tobacco industry--while many are addicted, most would also admit that the service/product is bad for you, and that they hope to quit one day. Once society in general begins to look down on the product's usage, the decline is inevitable. I give it no more than 4 more years before Facebook is equivalent to MySpace. (By comparison, I think LinkedIn will continue to shuffle along for decades more, because despite being lame and uninteresting it doesn't generate any addictive or unattractive behaviors in its users, and provides an actual service that people sometimes need, i.e. business contacts.)

At Lil Pete's college using LinkedIn is actually part of classwork. They're making contacts more deliberately than when I was in school. Of course I knew my bartender better...

I know LinkedIn is supposed to be good, and I've been on it for around a decade. But in my experience, it's just a way for sales people to contact me. I haven't seen any benefit.

But I your day, anyone who managed to graduate would snag some sort of job. The only competition was to see how far up the corporate ladder you could start from.
Not no mo... without specific skills, credits, and connections, you could be making a tent to survive, from your sheepskin these days.

I wonder why people send me Linked-In invites, when they know I'm happily retired. Must be the same reason they offered me sex when I was happily married... then both stopped at the same time. :haha:

I believe I have 3 connections...

I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections. It's now pushed heavily in grad school and as part of work due to the groups.

The groups are a lot better than what most web-based boards have become. I just don't have time for social media outlets these days between family, school, and work. There was a time I'd have the Cellar on in the background at work, but that was many years ago.

Yeah, but you also haven't been unemployed during that time. I know people who have successfully used their old job contacts on LinkedIn to get employment elsewhere after being laid off. They weren't anything like friends, just old coworkers, so there would have been no realistic way to get in touch with them otherwise.

See? You do use it, but you also know you don't have time for it and would probably be a little embarrassed to admit the amount of time you actually spend on it--no matter how small it may or may not be. Perhaps this very conversation will cause you to use it less, not because anyone has told you to, but because it's lost social respectability. The Thing To Do these days is talk about how you don't have time for that sort of endeavor.

It's on the way out.

Clodfobble,

I used to have a lot more time for it. Really. This used to be one of my big time-wasters. I used to telnet into the Waffle BBS-based predecessor of this place in the mid-90's. I used DDial for a number of years, and I posted on Usenet (yay comp.sys.cbm). I also used to IRC a lot.

Now I'm down to Facebook, LinkedIn, and here. Here is because I started calling it over 22 years ago. Facebook is because that's where pictures of my children and all of my friends' children are posted, and because that's where everyone else is at.

LinkedIn is entirely professional. Most of the professional organizations I belong to have LinkedIn groups, and those have information I need in them.

Facebook is the lowest common denominator. Everyone is there. More adventurous people have Ello, Google+, or the other networks. Like I said, I can get the info I need at a glance and be on my way :).

Reports have it that China has almost completed the Great Firewall of China. FaceBook, Gmail, and virtually everything else (except LinkedIn) have been banned. Based in nothing more from our Chinese Celllar Dwellers, I suspect The Cellar was also banned a few years ago.

And the rest of your synapses, what became of them?

Sadly Synapsed. :(

Are fried. :(