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Apparently, ODF is safe from this patent.

"Apple is first and foremost a marketing company, they spend more time and energy on creating images around their products then actually creating them."

Really?

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/07/apple-adds-staff-boosts-randd-spending-in-fy2008/

"The filing also said that Apple spent 40 percent more on research and development this year, compared to 2007: $1.1 billion."

http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10001556/examining-microsofts-and-apples-marketing-spend/

"Appleâ(TM)s filings for the quarter that ended on March 28, 2009 indicate that for the three month period, SG&A increased by 11 percent, or $99 million,"

So the marketing company spends about $400 million a year on marketing and $1,100 million a year on R&D. Yea, they are a tech company still.

As for not buying HP, not my choice, its the fiancee's and she loves them.

As for Apple not having a business range, those would be the MacBook Pro and Air lines.

I supported alot of Dell/Lenovo and IBM laptops in enterprise and education, from a support standpoint, the Dells were the worst, then MacBooks, Lenovo/IBM and finally MacBook Pros. So yea, from that standpoint the MacBook Pros were the "business" stable computers.

You can check here for a summar of the criticisms of the deal. Notice that the critics include librarians, the EFF, the Internet Archive, some authors, and at least one major copyright expert that you woudln't normally expect to be on the same side of a copyright issue.

This reminds me of this entry from a short while back. The whiny marketing major makes you feel a bit better about the narcissistic entitlement you encounter with developers, huh?

What I would really like to know is who at Nvidia thinks this is a good idea? Do we really need another x86 supplier? Are they going to aim for the low end or the high end? If it's the high end, I thought that Nvidia contracted out their manufacturing. http://industry.bnet.com/technology/1000386/nvidia-chip-problems-might-be-warning-for-everyone/ Maybe that explains why the company has had trouble with some of its graphics chips in the last year or so. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-10020782-33.html

Personally, I'm a little tired of companies contracting out their manufacturing to Asia to cut costs, and then not owning up to manufacturing defects when they come to light. It has kept me from buying an Xbox 360, and it will keep me from ever buying an Nvidia CPU. Of course, I don't drink Kook-Aid, so I'm obviously not the potential customer here.

You're a moron for excluding nuclear energy.

And you are a moron if you think that nuclear waste isn't a huge ecological disaster.

Burying tons and tons (about 30 tons per nuclear power plant, per year) of Uranium 238 which has a half life in the thousands of years is not a good "green" solution just because people want to have nice cool houses in the middle of summer and positively toasty ones in the winter.

Still not convinced? Here is an article from Business Net about what we are (not) going to do with all this radioactive waste.

I agree with you face-palming yourself, but it's not for the same reasons that you have. Honestly, if my backyard and my children's backyards weren't polluted by other people's mess, I wouldn't say a word. Sadly we all have to sleep in the bed you make though.

Suppose you're having a new house built: if you could install a ten or fifteen kilowatt solar plant and inverter for ten grand, you might figure it's worth it to borrow a little more money from the bank.

More and more mortgage companies are financing solar energy systems. Some allow borrowers to borrow more because of such systems. With an alternative energy system installed living costs are reduced so they are willing to lend a higher percent of the what the borrower's income would suggest.

Of course the mortgage crisis does have a negative impact, it has hurt solar businesses.

Falcon

I did not throw in system maintenance costs, which probably exist but I can't make an educated guess as to what they'd be.

Basic system maintenance is basically spraying off the panels to keep objects like leafs off. the rest of the components don't need much maintenance. Where maintenance is an issue is with batteries, which should only be used if the system is Off The Grid. Now, if you want you can record data on the performance of the system, like how much electricity it is producing. TFA's writer does this through the installer's system over the net. If you wanted do you could have data transmitted to your computer though. With this data you can optimize the system.

Also, due to time value of money, the increase in house value in 30 years would have to be quite large in order to equal the up-front payment.

Not if the cost is rolled into the mortgage, interest on the mortgage of a primary residence, the home you live in, is tax deductible. And more and more lenders are taking steps to allow people to install alternative energy systems like solar and wind. In some cases they lower interest or allow borrowers to borrow more. Mortgage companies realize such systems reduce living expenses and so may be willing to do these. The first page of results for googling solar mortgage shows two mortgage lenders who finance solar systems. Heck, one of the results, "The Mortgage Crisis Delivers a Hit to Solar Firms" goes over how the solar industry is affected by the mortgage crisis.

Net of all of this discussion: it still isn't a good decision based solely on financial terms unless the amount it adds to house value in the near-term is large (especially considering the high variability of some of the key cost savings).

Oh, I agree. Installing a solar energy system IS NOT good if you want a short term payoff, it's only good for the longer term financially. Then again most home buyers don't flip houses, buy a house then sale it again after a short period, say after making some improvements. There's no reason to for most people though, there are only three or four reasons to sell your home. Your first one is your starter home where you and your spouse, or significant other, live. You sell it and buy a bigger home when your family grows, then sell that one and buy a smaller one when the children have left. Of course if you move away you'll sale your old home and buy a new one where you move to.

Falcon

I did some quick research, what they came up with can be found here: BPR.

I'm sure they had a tough time decidig between BPR, BPRE, BPR-E, and BPRe. I'm also sure that they had an easy time billing the client for those hours.

I'd bet plenty of PHBs pronounce it as "beeper", which I'd also bet leads to all kinds of confusion as the sales force long ago upgraded from beepers to cell phones to crackberries.

That, and "Beeper" sounds like the name of a muppet.

Oh well, I suppose I'll log off and go watch whatever basketball game's on espen right now.

No, my point is that they are competing against themselves by making the content they sell freely available on their own website.

You are correct, in that newswire services like Reuters, Associated Press, and AFP are facing an oncoming "cannibal's dilemma".

That is the business-jargon for when your new product takes sales away from an existing product. It's hard to guess which one to focus on: short-term profits, or long-range survivability of the market segment.

Since The Internet makes it easier to exchange information, it's famous for pushing middlemen out of business, and allowing the source-producer and end-user to transact with each other directly. A regional newspaper is mostly a middleman: it buys global and national-level news from a wire service, does a small amount of reporting on local events, and then puts it all together in one printout to deliver each day. It is quite possible that that business model could be extinct within 10 years or so, and readers will all have their daily newspapers generated by pattern-matching search terms directly from wire-stories.

The wire services can't yet predict how long their existing customers will stay in business, or how fast they should move to an end-consumer focused organization. (That's the kind of strategic choice that MBAs are for, theoretically)

bnet.com is a pretty good repository from what I have seen. I have never tried to submit anything there, but it seems to be a decent site for business and IT related white paper.