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Something tells me if they're capable of getting nuclear engineers, they can figure out how to make a half-decent fighter jet if they really needed to.

They likely could, but it's still difficult and requires more than just some smart engineers. As has been pointed out, it's a manufacturing / design / maintenance chain that's complex and expensive. In addition, one or two nuclear weapons constitutes a "win" in this game. One or two reverse engineered F14's constitutes target practice for the Israeli Air Force.

The modular nature of aircraft makes it more useful to find spare parts wherever you can rather than make expensive, complex modules. You still have the non trivial task of putting the things together and keeping them their. And there are lots of used F14's out there. The Ebay stuff is a pretty marginal market for this kind of thing.

• Availability of supplies meeting U.S. specifications, so that demand
  
      can be met without the need for waivers that could compromise
      environmental protections.
      The speed with which incremental supply might be available, given
• 
      just-in-time gasoline inventories, in order to avoid excessive price
      volatility.
      The delivered price of foreign supplies, and whether they are above
• 
      the incremental price of domestic output, such that they ultimately
      contribute to higher prices.

I gather that his implication is that Microsoft might be willing to pay more than their current offer, but I'm pretty sure they're not willing to budge as they've previously stated they will not increase the already extremely high offer.

This is one reason MS needs to raise it's offer, it needs Yahoo! MS is trying to get into net advertising whereas Yahoo! is already established and has a healthy though small chunk of the market. MS already acquired online advertiser aQuantive, for $6 billion and handles ads on Facebook but it wants a bigger piece of the pie to take on Google.

In theory, if yahoo was taken over by microsoft, microsoft would control more of the search engine world than google.

That would be a nice theory if it were at all true. It isn't.

Different sources put Google's share at around 2/3, and Yahoo and MS combined at around 25-27 percent.

So what's that theory again?

It's not just in Microsoft's plans to go the route of digital downloads. Remember Apple? They're also betting on digital downloads as your preferred method of getting HD movies.

I think that if the business model for getting the movies becomes (stays?) acceptable to the majority and the pipes between the distributors and the devices gets wider than Blu-Ray will have won a Pyrrhic victory. Afterall, a subscription is on-going whereas a disc sale is a one-time and is meant to cover not only the license to watch that movie but also the prodution costs, distribution costs, advertising, etc.

Here's a question: If the studios offered you a subscription to get unlimited on-demand of their HD content, where you were paying US$12.95 per month for this access, would you accept it? There are 10,000,000 World of Warcraft users that follow this model for game play, why not for movie play?

It's a pretty big topic to summarise in a Slashdot posting, and you'd be a LOT better off doing your own research, if you're genuinely interested. But...

Basically, stock options are a company's way of convincing employees to take less real wages. Paying in stocks has some advantages, but one in particular is that they don't show up as a business loss. The downside is that the more shares out there, the lower the EPS (Earnings Per Share), and therefore the lower the value of each share. Microsoft has been playing this game for a long time, and had more than 20% of it's shares optioned out this way. About 5 years ago, shareholders started to get antsy about the constant dilution of their holdings, so MS restarted the buybacks.

There's also a Business Week article http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968099.htm which might be an easier read.

It doesn't look like that'll be the only problem facing MS either. Yahoo subsidiary Alibaba is bailing now the buyout looks likely.
http://www.secinvestor.com/2008/03/19/Alibaba+Wants+Out+Of+Microsoft+Deal+YHOO+MSFT.aspx

I'd like to have me a few of those failures every decade or so.

I don't think Microsoft would agree with you. If you look at W3Counter's stats, MS Operating systems have been losing about half a percent market share per month for the past 6 months.

Now, I've given you the benefit of doubt and responded politely in this post, but frankly I'd be much happier if you stopped stalking me. I'm finding your attention a bit creepy. Thanks.

Even just looking at search engine queries it's possible to put QUITE a bit of data together. And Google is a natural starting point for a government to start looking for dirt on an individual. If a totalitarian government suspects that an individual is up to no good, then it just has to force Google (one company) to open up its books to figure out some good leads. Maybe he's searching for bomb-making materials, or maybe he's just searching for information about Tianamen Square. Either way, Google knows what's up and can lead the government to the next steps. Or Google can reveal if the victim has some weakness, like an embarassing disease or secret lover.

Good luck trying to figure it out without a search engine--the government would have to randomly go after sites until it happened across a match. Google is one of the key starting point for government abuse of its citizens, short of installing the Great Firewall.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc20080128_984623.htm

The big question on the minds of Apple watchers is: Where have the other 1.7 million iPhones gone?

The uncertainty has helped sink Apple's (AAPL) stock price to $130 a share, down 34% since the beginning of the year. That is far worse than the 13% drop for the tech-heavy Nasdaq index.

And an inventory buildup is always dangerous, particularly amid slowing demand. Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, figures Apple's first-quarter iPhone sales could be down as much as 30% compared with daily sales rates last year.

Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co., believes the carrier pays Apple $10 per iPhone-brandishing subscriber per month of the two-year contract. While Apple still earns admirable margins on each iPhone it sells, missing out on this cut of monthly phone bills would cost Apple $300 million to $400 million in revenue and profits for every million unlocked phones sold. Although Apple posted sales of $24 billion in 2007, such lost revenues could become more significant as the iPhone becomes a bigger part of Apple's overall business. This year consultant Technology Business Research expects Apple to sell 7 million units, booking $1.7 billion in revenues and $340 million in operating income.

It seems most of the commentators here have not looked at the filings in this case, or read the numerous articles about it on various legal blogs. It is not quite as is being reported here. The two lawyers who are suing him were representing the other side in a case against Cisco. On his blog, he accused them of altering the filing date on some court documents. That's a very serious accusation--if they did it, it would be both a breach of legal ethics and a felony.

In general, it is very very bad for a lawyer to publicly accuse another lawyer of committing a felony unless the accuser has some pretty damned convincing evidence.

And it is a zillion times worse when the accusing lawyer is counsel for the other side in a case the accused lawyer is working on.

Troll Tracker screwed up big time here (heck, commenting AT ALL on a case involving Cisco is a bit shocking), and is probably going to have to cough up a public apology and a wad of cash. It's not about free speech, as some other posters have suggested--it is a plain, old-fashioned "if you accuse someone of a serious crime, you'd better be able to back it up" case.

There's an informative post about the case here. That's a handy blog about activity in the Eastern District of Texas. There was also good coverage in Business Week.

The methodology for this is pretty silly. Interbrand is the known leader in research-based brand valuation and brand strength. Check out their reports at the links below. Also, note that other famous technology brand names aren't even on the list-including the beloved Apple and Google.

http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2006/
http://www.interbrand.com/surveys.asp (source for the Business Week report)
http://www.ourfishbowl.com/images/surveys/Interbrand_BGB_2007.pdf

Actually, it's the third split. Motorola spun off it's semi-conductor division in 1999. Business Week article

To call Japan Steel Works a "sword maker" is like referring to Microsoft as "that company that makes Minesweeper". Japan Steel Works is a very large steel company that makes a very wide variety of products (of which swords are a very, very small part) and did $2 billion worth of sales in 2007 alone.

I mean seriously, Slashdot, isn't this story cool enough without adding misleading sensationalist crap onto it?

IIRC, the reason why the cable companies don't want A-La Carte pricing is because the law only applies to consumers.

Businesweek 12/7/05

While it may be years before any such model is put in place and it's hard to say how the end result will look, a consensus is emerging that some channels would suffer -- if not fall away altogether. Content providers now compel cable operators to offer their niche channels by bundling them with must-haves like ESPN or MTV. Without being bundled into a bigger package, less popular channels such as ESPN Classic and MTV2 could struggle to garner a large enough audience to survive.

So while the consumer can choose what channels he or she wants, the cable company still has to pay for it. It's kind of like if the Grocery Store (cable company) forced you (the consumer) to buy the fruit salad because they bought all their fruit from the same company (TV station) who charges them the same regardless of how many individual pineapples or watermelons they bought. Oh, and noone else is making these varieties of pineapples or watermelons. Now, if you want Papaya (specialty station) you can go to the Grocery Store down the street (Satellite) but they make their fruit salad without the Pineapples which you want.

So the consumer's best option is to get his tropical fruit off someone selling out of his van (P2P), which has it's own set of risks entirely.

Read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" (summary of what I'm talking about here).

The author argues that innovation in disk drives comes from new players. This was true of the transitions from 8" drives -> 5.25" -> 3.5" -> 2.5" -> 1.8" drives. Basically, older companies continue selling their products, oblivious to new markets (for which their older product doesn't fit). Eventually, the new market takes over and the old disk drive is useless. It took an ipod to make 1.8" mass-produced, and now I can buy a laptop that has one of these smaller drives in it. Desktops used to use 5.25" drives until luggables started making the 3.5" form factor popular.

Uuuuuuuh 400 Million for a body of works that's set begin expiring in 2013?

I guess $400 Million US Pesos is a only a few hundred pounds.

TFA in this post reads a lot like TFA in an earlier post about the supposed science and engineering labor shortage. In both cases, we see governmental and educational institutions using a perceived need for more labor in a certain sector as a means for spending programs and college recruiting, while not tailoring their approaches to meet specific market demands.

If it makes you happy, ya'll can debate all day long about whether or not the myth is really a myth or just a function of the fact that only people with 5 to 10 years' experience in the real world aren't wasting the oxygen of the world's self-made uber-programmers. Personally, I would rather think about what this common thread means in broader terms. What do these two articles, taken together, say about macro-scale patterns related to the labor market and, more importantly, American global competitiveness? What does the fact that schools and government incentive programs are not flexible enough to meet specific demands mean in terms of their abilities to promote the pursuit of livelihoods tailored for educated (and more importantly, according to you lot, self-educated) science, engineering, and IT professionals? What, in turn, does this say about the plans of various political candidates (Obama and McCain, chief among them), to deal with globalization through job retraining?

Who would have thought that a Japanese company DIDNT come up with the Squirtatron?

The Taliban may be concerned that US forces are using the cell towers as a passive rader system to track their movements, as described here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_42/b3854113.htm

Afgan cellular companies have three choices: 1) keep the towers running 24 hours a day, 2) give into the Taliban, or 3) say they're not going to comply but then contract AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint to manage their systems, which in terms of service pretty would much achieve the same result as option 2.

it's living in peace, rather than being stuck in a war of attrition in the Middle East.

Consider that the National Association for the Self-Employed...

...is a front for MEGA Life and Health. Though they certainly try to hide it, NASE is not an actual indepentent "association", but the marketing arm of MEGA. Fortunately, the high-pressure sale techniques of the agent I encountered were enough to tip me off that something was wrong, and I Googled before I bought and so learned how bad the "coverage" MEGA provides actually is.

Avoid NASE. It's a scam.

*Sighs*

Anyway, the most important thing is that we have one HD format now, so new HD consumers don't have to be afraid to cut themselves with the wrong format. I'm glad it's Blu-Ray, but HD-DVD would've been acceptable as well.

Honestly, Slashdot posts more old regurgitated FUD then Engaget and Gizmodo.

The "analyst" rumor that Slashdot links to in the OP was started by Business Week back in January, but was quickly denied in the next sentence by Barry Meyer, CEO of Warner Brothers.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc2008014_928006.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story

"One source reported that Toshiba had offered to pay more than $100 million, while Sony bid closer to $400 million. But Meyer denied there was a bidding war and said Warner instead looked solely at global sales of both formats in making its decision."

The iPod was only $399 when it was released in October of 2001. While they initially only worked with Macs support for Windows was added in July of 2002 through MusicMatch Jukebox. The flash based players of the time were only slightly cheaper than the iPod's initial $399 price and held an order of magnitude fewer songs. It's a bit of revisionist history to suggest that the iPod didn't gain a lot of attention right out of the box. The iPod sold more than a quarter million units in its first year and nabbed about 7.1% of the PMP market after only six months. That's 0% to 7% in six months. To suggest the iPod wasn't a big deal is kind of silly. I know you're trolling but try to sound believable.

I'm not surprised that the average person doesn't remember the rise and fall of New Century Network, but at the very least some of the newspapers involved in this debacle-to-be should -- they're about to make all the same mistakes over again!

Finally something good to come out of France in awhile.

A better and cleaner solution is the "Air Car". Powered by compressed air.

The prototype is supposed to travel up to 150 miles off one fill up with a top speed of 60 mph.

When they hit final production, I think I'll be buying one just so I can laugh my ass off as I pass every gas station.

I'm only trying to exclude the guy who generally doesn't copy, but once got a mix tape from his girlfriend. Things like routinely pirating software, using a P2P network, or borrowing a friend's CD to make a copy are all included.

As for personal experience bias, take a look at some figures. The first hit I got for "worldwide iPod sales" is a Business Week article from 2004 that puts the global annual sales for such players at 17 million units. Unless you think annual distribution has increased by more than an order of magnitude in the interim, there is no way that everyone under 30 has an iPod or similar, even in first world places like the US, western Europe and Australia.

yeah, sure, go ahead and blame GM's financial troubles on paying $30/hour salaries to their workers rather than the gigantic compensation they pay their executives.

When GM Vice Chairman Lutz said that "executive salaries are like professional athelete salaries" http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2006/01/gm_execs_no_pay.html/ he thought that was a good thing!

Last you heard, you heard wrong.

That's ancient news. Since then, the blue laser shortage has ended, and Sony has gotten the costs of PS3 manufacture down to under $400.

Per BusinessWeek they were 2 years ago

Except that the Xbox and Xbox 360 has been major economic sinkholes. From 2002 to 2004 the then Home and Entertainment Division made an accumulated loss for 3.5 billion dollars. From 2005 to 2007 the new Entertainment and Devices division made an accumalted loss of 3.7 billion dollars. So over those 6 years they lost 7.2 billion dollars. Imagine how hard it will to make that money back (plus the lost interest on it) from a division that has a 6 billion revenue per year and never has shown a profit.

Microsoft has tried several directions when it comes to break into new markets but let's face it, they haven't done a very good job of it. Their money comes from the Server and Tools Division and the Business Division (Office etc.). And I don't think it's going to change... perhaps because they aren't used to competing on merits alone.

2004 10-K (has the 2002 to 2004 numbers) http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000119312504150689/d10k.htm 2007 10-K (has the 2005 to 2007 numbers) http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/drawFiling.asp?docKey=136-000119312507170817-22AR89VDNH3I307BANT6DSD928&docFormat=HTM&formType=10-K

Everything I have ever heard in the past and everything I could find from looking around just now indicated that they have no bizarre "save your receipts" requirement.

The QT libraries are supposed to be licensed under GPL3 (see Trolltech ) and KDE and anyone else for that matter can use them so if a court case is held it is going to be very interesting.

Even if the QT libraries are under GPL3 this still does not stop propriety and even closed source software from using them and remaining proprietary. Of course if you or Nokia modify the QT libraries the changes must be made available as per what the GPL3 requires. This still allows Nokia to provide paid support which is no different from what Trolltech does already.

See the following article for an interesting slant on why Nokia purchased Trolltech Businessweek .

...MS profits surge, up 79%.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc20080124_168649.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002414.htm?chan=search
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576854-1,00.html

I like Wal-Mart's solution, simply close the store.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_07/b3971115.htm

Unions are for manual labor jobs where you could completely lose your ability to work, and are at risk of being replaced by the next guy that will do it for $1 less. They should not exist for forcing employers to keep paying incompetents an inflated salary.

In 1965, U.S. corporate taxes amounted to 4% of gross domestic product, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development which includes local, state, and federal income and capital-gains taxes in its calculation. By 2000, that figure had dropped to 2.5%.

House approves $30 billion in corporate tax breaks

Article promoting it on MSN.com without mentioning MSFT :
A corporate tax break that could benefit you

Microsoft Reduces Irish Corporate Tax Liability To Less Than 10%

WTO rules against US corporate tax breaks

The EU was set to implement retaliatory tariffs

Senate Approves Tech Corporate Tax Break

Ms use share options to reduce their tax bill by $5.5 billion

Microsft & Cisco pay $0 Federal Income Tax

Business Week has numbers today

Time Warner intends to offer plans priced for up to 5, 10, 20, and 40 gigabytes per month, with middle-tiered plans running roughly the same amount average users currently pay for high-speed connections. (Time Warner offers high-speed plans for $29.95 a month in some areas.)

That means movies downloaded will cost you about $10 each, significantly more than the nearest competition which is movie rental. Think about that, you can only watch five or six hours of good quality video a month via internet.

What this means is that TW and the MAFIAA have effectively countered internet media competition. While places like Japan have laid fiber networks, our ISPs have intentionally held back broadband deployment and spent your money on their profits and performance degrading filtering equipment. There are now 25 countries with better networks than ours. The capacity really is there on US cable networks, but it's all wastefully dedicated to broadcasts that mostly go unwatched. TW and other ISPs are rocketing us back to the bad old days of pay per minute access, all so incumbents can keep their positions. Internet radio has been crushed by Sound Exchange and mandatory fees. Content filtering threatens to exterminate Google and the extensive collection of news and media supported by adverts. When it's all said and done, TW's network will look a lot like cable TV does now. This was their intention when they bought AOL.

The effect on the economy will likely cause a recession. Lots of money is tied up in new businesses that would work if the US had a reasonable internet. All other businesses will feel the pinch of high telco costs and slow, unreliable networks. People at TW and other major ISPs should be facing anti-trust, bribery and negligence charges.

The original old ThinkPad design is the one in MOMA - designed by Richard Sapper.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/10/richard_sapper/index_01.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad
It's a nicely detailed design. His most famous design would be the Tizio lamp, as seen in flash offices in movies from the 80's:
http://land.liquid-light.org/tizio/tizio-treff.jpg
You can kinda see the same aesthetic carrying over: simple, straight lines, technical, precise.

Sapper is an interesting guy - no industrial design training, just picked it up and got world famous.

Since then, IBM/Lenovo seem to have diluted the original design intent until now all you've got is the fact that it's black and boxy. I don't think they really understood the design language they inherited, and most of the stuff in the ThinkPad line is just darn hideous. Lines and edges all over the place, arbitrarily mixed with curves (NO curves in the original). The fact they claim lineage in that he 'influences' their current design doesn't convince me he actually creates it.

mod (-1): pretentious - go ahead...

I just read this Business Week article that talks about a test program they did in Washington, where a change in line frequency was used to trigger appliances and air conditioners to shut off. Personally, I'd never voluntarily participate in a 3rd party controlling my electric usage, and if it were forced on me I'd disable their ability to do so. If my house is too hot then I should be able to cool it down, or if I need clean clothes then I'm going to do what must be done, not be late getting to work or any other appointment because someone else decided to shut my dryer off.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2007/db20071220_511151.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_companies

Kevin got his plum FCC assignment when he was airlifted to Florida to help Bush steal the election in 2000. He's a whore. He's just not the cable companies' whore. BusinessWeek explains that he "earned his spurs by being on the first flight to Florida from Austin the day after the contested 2000 election. As deputy general counsel to the Bush campaign, he oversaw the legal team working behind the scenes with the Dade and Broward County canvassing boards."

There are industry estimates that say average code in production contains 2 bugs per thousand lines of code. Some say that number is much higher. How many lines do you think are in Vista?

Yes, OSS has bugs. Everything from compilers to content management systems, surely. So do proprietary programs.

The more qualified eyes you get on a bug, the better chance you have of finding and fixing it. You can do that by having a big staff that pores over code again and again. You can do it by having lots of outside help, like in the case of popular OSS projects. One thing that helps is to have a fresh set of eyes look over something, which is much easier in OSS that in closed-source applications.

BusinessWeek had an article from a guy at Coverity back in 2006 about this. In that article, Ben Chelf said that 4 of the top 15 programs on the quality scale measured by defects per thousand lines of code were OSS. He said that on average, the major-project OSS software they tested was indeed higher quality software than average. He said, though, that the absolute highest quality code was the cream-of-the-crop proprietary, closed source code from places that make things like fly-by-wire systems. Well, yeah. I'd want my airliner's fly-by-wire system completely bug-free, too.

Commercial software tends to harbor anywhere from 1 to 7 bugs per 1000 lines of code according to the National Cybersecurity Partnership's Working Group on the Software Lifecycle. Voluntary testing by Coverity requested (and probably paid for) by MySQL AB revealed that project to have all of 97 flaws, one of which could be a serious security issue. All 97 were to be fixed for the next release.

A similar study (same link) found 985 bugs in over 5,700,000 lines in the Linux kernel, or fewer than one bug per 10,000 lines of code. TFA has data on a newer version of the kernel -- 0.127 bugs per TLOC.

In Apache, 22 bugs total, 0.14 per TLOC, and three fixed so far.

PostgreSQL had 0.041 per TLOC, and have so far fixed 53 of the 90 bugs.

The glibc team fixed 83 of 83 bugs found.

OpenVPN had found one security-related bug in over 69,000 lines of code. As of later yesterday, it's officially security bug free according to the same testing people.

The list of officially security-bug free software includes Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL.

So with Linux (0.127), glibc (0.000), Apache (0.140), PostgresSQL (0.041), Perl (0.024), PHP (0.000), and Python (0.000) powering a web server (numbers according to Coverity), you have 0.0474 defects per thousand lines of code across the server. I'd say that's pretty good.

GM needs to come out with some crazy stuff like this soon because they're failing in their core products.

Apple introduced the iTMS in April 2003

Over a year later, they had 8-50% of the market, depending on exactly which numbers you look at.

So it sounds like they were in the MINORITY when they put protected-AAC support in. Of the many reasons why this suit-of-the-day is probably groundless, I think this is a good one: are they required to worry about anticompetitive practices when they aren't yet a monopoly? Once they become one, are the required to change? I would think not--if the market didn't like the restrictive product they introduced, it wouldn't have become dominant in the first place.

This isn't like MS giving away IE for free AFTER Windows was firmly established as the dominant desktop OS. This is like if MS had given away IE since the Windows 1.0 days. Did any of the MS antitrust suits include complaints that they bundled Notepad? More people probably play Solitaire and the other bundled games than use Notepad--were there ever any antitrust suites re: the games?