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Being a major player is NOT the same as being a monopoly. They claim to sell 70% of all downloaded music, but even the possibly overestimated-by-Apple market share numbers for the iPod itself are only 40-50%. (and that's only counting certain markets)

Who will actually be able to even buy it at that price when it hits? Most people probably wont be able to get the stock until its even higher. How does one go about getting a stock at its IPO price?

Open an account with a participating broker.

That share price is nothing compared to Berkshire Hathaway. It's not the share price that matters, but the earnings per share ($5,190 in the case of Berkshire). A higher stock price is justified if earnings are high and have growth potential.

"You wouldn't buy a used car over the net would you?"

A million others disagree. Still, that seeems really risky to me. There's a good Q&A at the end of the article.

According to InfoWorld in Jul 2003, Longhorn was to be released in 2005. Sometime after that, I think in the 4th Quarter of 2003, they stated Longhorn would release in the first half of 2006, and I believe the latest date is second half of 2006. There's also widely publicized data on feature reductions in Longhorn, to enable them to maybe make the 2006 date. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the 2006 date may be a bit too agressive (or maybe it does). I personally wouldn't be surprised to see Longhorn ship in 2Q or 3Q of 2007, if not later. Security is, after all, job 1 at MS now, and they have such a stellar record with it... take, for example. XP SP2, delayed yet again.... Yep, MS will surely ship Longhorn in 2006. They said so in early 2004!

There's also the issue of MS release schedules. MS does not do a release more often than every 2 years. Since I believe they're still planning on the "new" XP release, that implies that Longhorn would be no earlier than the end of 2006. Granted, this is conjecture, but has held true so far.

What you're talking about...the absurd specs of 4 GHz, terabyte of hard drive, etc

That was a dual-core 4Ghz CPU btw, and probably necessary to be able to do anything with the original WinFS busily collating and searching all that data. Hardware requirements will be directly affected by the reduced feature set that will actually ship with Longhorn, and I don't wonder that some of the feature clipping will be purely to reduce hardware requirements.

Take WinFS with network share information, somehow that just screams large amounts of RAM and disk space to me. Remove it, and that requirement is seriously reduced, as likely happened within MS once they realized what that actually meant. I'm not surprised that was moved to the vapor BlackComb, which is actually the new, true Longhorn, while Longhorn becomes more like XP. The further this progresses, the more I'm reminded of the never achieved Cairo....

Anymore FUD you wish to discuss/disprove?

El Al, the Israeli airline, is world-reknowned for its security measures.

Here's an informative article from Business Week about a year ago.

The point is that effective and efficient security can be achieved, and it doesn't require this sort of extreme federal legislation. I think that if US carriers and airports look to the example set by El Al, air travel would be much safer.

Exactly - and in much of Central and South America, kidnapping for ransom is a large and growing problem. I sometimes travel internationally on business, and there's no way I'd head down there these days. Fortunately for me, I usually head to Scandanavia. I'll let the Swedish Bikini Team take me hostage anytime...

Mainstream? Like Forbes, BusinessWeek , Ziff-Davis (and here and here too), CBS News, USA Today, and most have heard of PC Magazine, plus a lot of papers like The Houston Chronicle, The Detroit News, the Syracuse Post-Standard, The Baltimore Sun, and the St. Louis Post-Standard. I have all those links plus others in a list I just send to people. I keep adding to it as I find more. Usually gets the message across that I'm not making stuff up.

How long is it going to be before some big mainstream press picks these recursive stories up and starts recommending people try another web browser?

I'd consider Business Week pretty mainstream. From it's July 12th Issue: Why I'm Staying Away From Internet Explorer (registration required). A column by Stephen H. Wildstrom in which he states "I've been increasingly concerned about IE's endless security problems, and this episode has convinced me that the program is simply too dangerous for routine use."

A different assessment of desktop share: "IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple ... the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007."

Says one young man: "If my girlfriend sends me an e-mail note, I spend hours agonizing over what I think she really means."

that sided with Verisign and then claimed the Internet's infrastructure is archaic

that sided with Verisign and then claimed the Internet's infrastructure is archaic

Yeah, and they've been in the news a lot lately. I guess everybody picks on you when you're popular.

I thought I might bring up Shuji Nakamura, the guy who invented the blue LED. And how afterwards he got shafted by the company he was working for.

This link takes you to an editorial about how poorly inventors and engineers in Japan are treated by management.

Strangely enough however, I cannot find any mention of how poorly they treated Mr Nakamura in any of the bigger business journals. They talk only about how much he earned them, and leave out how little he was paid in compensation.

Only if you keep using outdated and poorly engineered OS's and hardware instead of Power Macs which are designed to handle dates through A.D. 29,940

Disclaimer: Y2K was nothing but overblown crap reported on by the uninformed media, and I would not want to be in any way associated with it. I just found it funny that PPC Mac's handle such huge dates.

NEC Z1 I have one of these as my linux box. I've got slackware 9.1 running on it, even plays DVD just wish it was a little faster. the Keyboard kinda sucks but everything else is sweet. Has IR, PCMCIA, PCI, DVD, flat panel, and uses standard memory. If any one knows where I might find some more please let me know.

Both Gator and WhenU do it this way -- they don't need to collect any user information, it's all done "live". I'm not sure how flooding their servers will mess this up.

I prefer Wristomo, even if the watch itself seems bigger. I would hate to have some wire connected on the watch

You're mistaken. He's actually calling you! At least that's what the article implies...

Some more stuff-

Sky Sports(UK) has a race day program(1 hour) before every formula1 race starts. Once every 2-3 races, they examine the technical aspects of formula1 racing. The steering wheel is discussed twice during the racing year.
The steering wheel costs more than your average luxury sedan. For this 2004 season, FIA made manual shifting mandatory but the top teams still manage to work their way around it and have part of it computer controlled.

About sponsorships, formula1 car workings, upto date news- see BBC Formula1 Many articles on the RHS.
For those who don't get Speed Channel, you can follow live timing(and a lot more) and unbiased commentary on the formula1.com website.
If you are a car collector, you can buy actual parts of the BAR forumla1 car from the pure racing club at BAR(flash).
Also take a look at its quarterly magazine( its nice).
I hven't read the article yet but there is a lot of money sloshing around in F1. Ferrari alone spends 500 million$ a year(and this was 2 years back). BMW vaulted to one of the top teams because they put some of their best engineers and spent a buttload of money(350 million+) initializing the team.
Even Minardi which is the poorest team in f1 spends as much or more than the top Indy racing teams.
During 2000-2002 there was a lot of controversy regarding sale of global tv rights to Kirch(German media company). A lot of F1 teams threatened to form a new series of their own from 2008. The threats aren't so loud now but the issue still simmers.

Job Growth Chart

oh.

For those interested this article from BusinessWeek has an update on DARPA's goal of funding the building of a petaflop (quadillions of calcuations a second) computer. This and other BusinessWeek articles indicate that while Asia may have the lead on the US now, the US will likely take back the leadership position by the end of the decade.

The name of the company and the computer, pronounced oh-QUE-oh, was picked at random. It doesn't mean anything, but they liked it because a Google search showed that no one else was using it.

This means that new, well-sited wind towers can compete with coal- or gas-fired plants, charging 3 cents to 6 cents per kilowatt hour, versus around 4 cents for coal or gas.

Heres's the direct link to the BusinessWeek story

I found this story wirtten on May 5, 2004 which states "ON THE VERGE. Still, if the iPod were a stock, I'd dump my shares. It's hard to imagine Apple maintaining its dominant position in digital music. Jobs had actually predicted 100 million in iTMS song sales in the first year, and he missed by a wide mark. Apple managed to turn in only a 10% quarter-over-quarter increase in iPod sales last quarter, implying the market is slowing. And several top executives dumped millions of their own Apple shares in late April, the first major sale by insiders in years" The article goes on to say that Apple w\should spin off iPod now and pocket the cash while the gettings is good.

Ok, first Ashcroft wants to tackle porn (link), then they want the DOJ to go after file swappers?

This is one of the biggest reasons Bush's continued 9/11 references make me ill. I could deal with it if they were actually working to fight terror. Instead, every time somebody waves the bloody shirt, all we get is some tired propaganda for drilling in the Arctic, a Federal Marriage Amendment, tax cuts for the wealthy, or some other thing we have to do to keep the terrorists from winning. Meanwhile, Homeland Security isn't getting the funds it needs for simple, basic port (seaport, not computer port) scanners: link (found on Instapundit).

I'm a hawk on security, folks. A hard-core, let's get them before they get us, serious hawk. And I'm voting against Bush and his idiots for precisely that reason.

(Sorry for the rant, but I just couldn't take it any more. Feel free to mod this down.)

As this article in BusinessWeek points out, Microsoft is trying to settle and partner rather than fight in court.

Fake security - real control. This is to keep people IN - not out.... "In Soviet America, Passport stamps You!"

The parent got modded funny for the Soviet Russia joke; but he should be getting modded Insightful for pointing out the real reason from these new passports.

Like me expand a bit on his insight: these biometric passports are the thin edge -- a proof of concept, if you will -- of mandatory National ID cards.

Indeed, Homeland Security will point out stories, like the one posted above about the 88 illegal immigrants taking a domestic flight from California to New Jersey and the general ability if illegals to bypass our borders, as evidence that we will need a "fool-proof" way of ascertaining identity not only at the borders but inside the United States.

And since the biometric passport will by then have been, however reluctantly, accepted, the government will apply the same technology to National ID cards.

Of course, a National ID card is only useful if it's checked, so expect to see uniformed men asking you to present it: "Your papers, Citizen!". This will also have the useful -- for the government -- side effect of getting the citizenry used to seeing and docilely taking orders from uniformed "security" officers; you can already see that happening in airports and government buildings, where we've all learned to shut-up and passively follow orders from any guy with three days of training and a badge, on penalty of delay, harassment or arrest.

(This acclimation to the presence of soldiers as quasi law-enforcement, incidentally, is one of the requirements Army War College grad Charles Dunlap posits for "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012", co-winner in 1992 of the of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition -- in other words, it's not a fringe tin-foil hat screed.)

Expect also that the government will quickly thereafter require presentation of the National ID for transactions that "terra'ists use", like banking or buying plane and train tickets, similar to the "Know Your Customer" requirements of the "Patriot" Act. A little way down the road, expect that the government will expanded the "significant economic activity" to encompass all credit card purchases -- and perhaps using the fig leaf of "preventing (economic) identity theft", will require your National ID Card be presented for all credit card purchases.

At that point, you'll either have to present you National ID Card several times a day, or remove yourself from "the grid" entirely. I can think of few ways better to suppress dissent than letting anyone contemplating it know that their movements can be tracked with this sort of granularity: "why did you use the ATM machine a block from the People Against Surveillance meeting, Citizen? are you a member of this anti-Patriotic organization"?

Now, some will accuse me of wearing my tin-foil hat too tight: I'll refer them to the subpoenaing of protest groups' membership records (dropped only after unfavorable publicity), the CAPPS II Airline screening and the subpoenaing of women's medical records of their abortions (this link from BusinessWeek, of all places, the FBI investigation of Freedom of Information act requests, and the Federal prosecution -- even after state charges were thrown out of court -- of peaceful protestors against Bush. And there are, unfortunately, many many more examples of the current administration supressing dissent -- in fact, if you're reading this, please reply with links to more of these cases.

In fact, they've already announced they will.

I don't know why other people keep saying Pixar don't want to do sequels. Businessweek says Steve Jobs also wants Toy Story 3.

I think it is this first article, but the day I was reading the BusinessWeek on the plane, both of these articles raised some good points about the lack of jobs and increased productivity:

The Price Of Efficiency
Stop blaming outsourcing. The drive for productivity gains is the real culprit behind anemic job growth

Where Are The Jobs?
Economic growth is very strong, but America isn't generating enough jobs. Many blame outsourcing. The truth is a lot more complicated

I think it is this first article, but the day I was reading the BusinessWeek on the plane, both of these articles raised some good points about the lack of jobs and increased productivity:

The Price Of Efficiency
Stop blaming outsourcing. The drive for productivity gains is the real culprit behind anemic job growth

Where Are The Jobs?
Economic growth is very strong, but America isn't generating enough jobs. Many blame outsourcing. The truth is a lot more complicated

Sales does not mean profits. Even though the sales of WiFi products more than tripled in 2003, the revenue growth of the market wasn't as good. Which means one thing - together with high demand the prices are falling down dramatically, and by now the WiFi equipment is heavily commoditized and thus outsourced to Chinese/Taiwanese/Indonesian manufacturers, which in the hardware world generally means no one else is expecting to make any money off of it (the same for Ethernet network cards, CD-Rs and other products).

The market will grow (in fact there are 700K WiFi networks right now, and much more are expected), but the margin range is just not there - I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the year the WiFi prices hit such a rock bottom, that some manufacturers will in fact lose money.

Apple is doing very nice - 20.2% of the 802.11g market, the first-mover advantage, and leading in revenues, outrunning even Cisco (according to Business Week). But (a) we still have to find out what the profit margins are on Apple WLAN equipment and whether SteveJ got his R&D expenses back by now, and (b) Apple is one company that is uncapable of fighting price wars. Pitch Apple against a Chinese clone factory pushing millions of WiFi access points and networks cards at half the prices, and market share is eroded. Unless Apple finds some way to lock up consumers into buying its products (easy to do with Powerbooks, not so easy with Airport access point buyers), they won't do well either in this market.

This BusinessWeek article states that you'll be able to work disconnected, then sync up the next time you connect. So IBM is building replication capabilities into their products. Makes sense; IBM has replication know-how from both their Lotus Notes and their DB2 database products.

The BusinessWeek take on the announcement. They make a point that IBM's timing of this release is in some part due to the the delay in the "Longhorn."

What's This? The French Love McDonald's?

But this is way off-topic...

And guess what company is making lots of moolah of wireless hardware, having a 20% marketshare in Wireless-G?




You guessed it, Apple. And given the number of PowerBook users I see taking advantage of WiFi in academic settings alone, possibly excluding Mac users is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot in the hotspot business.

The problem is, I've never paid these people a single penny for ANY of this. How the hell are they going to make money?

Um, you do realize that Google already makes a profit, don't you? I daresay the IPO will puff the value of the company up beyond the rational amount, but that's not 'Enron' -- if you are going to use buzzwords, use the right ones. Enron was a case of internal actors in the company using financial games to siphon off profits and inflate the value of the company on the books. You accusing Google of financial fraud? If you are going to use a buzzword, use 'Yahoo' or something -- a solid company that got its stock price puffed up excessively due to investor mania.

How the hell did this get moderated up, except as 'Funny'?

Full-featured .Mac Mail includes web access, auto-reply, and IMAP and POP support, plus tons of storage and no annoying ads.

From the Business Week article, it looks like they're making stronger vessels to hold the liquids at very high pressures:
"Since ordinary sonoluminescence delivers so much energy at pressures of only one or two atmospheres," he says, "you could hope that at 1,000 atmospheres, you'd be in fusion territory -- if the temperature also scaled up. But that's a really big 'if."'

I'm also surprised that this isn't on the main page of Slashdot. When reading the previous article on the discovery, there was a lot of "let's wait for confirmation" messages. Now we have it and it seems an appropriate time to get excited.

The coolest part about all of this is that it's relatively cheap, with the possibility of inexpensive and clean energy. The scary aspect that I haven't seen mentioned is that it could be an good source of neutrons used to enrich uranium and make weapons-grade material.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!

July 2003
"It's hard to design a better scenario for us than what Apple did. Apple serves only 5 percent of the market, and it doesn't offer an all-you-can-eat service, just downloads. One of our challenges is teaching consumers about digital music. It's great having Steve Jobs get the word out, since we have the best service for the 95 percent of people who don't use a Mac."

September 2001
"One of [the] surest ways you could drive Bill nuts was to say that Apple is the company that innovates, and Microsoft is the company that iterates. But I think it's basically true. My goal was to create a company culture that has the same pioneering, innovative spirit that one associates with Apple and that has the persistence, a willingness to go nose to the grindstone, that one associates classically [with] Japanese manufacturing companies, like Matsushita, and with Microsoft."

Now, to put the current Real/Apple relationship in perspective, take a look at this May, 2001 tidbit:

"Today, Glaser's RealNetworks, with 26 million users, beats out both Microsoft's and Apple's offerings. Apple, which has slipped to No. 3 behind Microsoft, continues to lose ground. In January, the number of QuickTime users fell to 7.29 million, down 8.4% from a year earlier, according to a recent survey by market researcher Jupiter Media Matrix. Windows Media Player had 21.5 million users, according to the same study."

Sounds like Glaser is trying really hard to make his position look solid, but he sees the writing on the wall. Consumers are fed up with Real's "hunt for the free download" tactics, and aren't taking to Real 10 the way he'd hoped.

July 2003
"It's hard to design a better scenario for us than what Apple did. Apple serves only 5 percent of the market, and it doesn't offer an all-you-can-eat service, just downloads. One of our challenges is teaching consumers about digital music. It's great having Steve Jobs get the word out, since we have the best service for the 95 percent of people who don't use a Mac."

September 2001
"One of [the] surest ways you could drive Bill nuts was to say that Apple is the company that innovates, and Microsoft is the company that iterates. But I think it's basically true. My goal was to create a company culture that has the same pioneering, innovative spirit that one associates with Apple and that has the persistence, a willingness to go nose to the grindstone, that one associates classically [with] Japanese manufacturing companies, like Matsushita, and with Microsoft."

Now, to put the current Real/Apple relationship in perspective, take a look at this May, 2001 tidbit:

"Today, Glaser's RealNetworks, with 26 million users, beats out both Microsoft's and Apple's offerings. Apple, which has slipped to No. 3 behind Microsoft, continues to lose ground. In January, the number of QuickTime users fell to 7.29 million, down 8.4% from a year earlier, according to a recent survey by market researcher Jupiter Media Matrix. Windows Media Player had 21.5 million users, according to the same study."

Sounds like Glaser is trying really hard to make his position look solid, but he sees the writing on the wall. Consumers are fed up with Real's "hunt for the free download" tactics, and aren't taking to Real 10 the way he'd hoped.

MAY 14, 2001
Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig is on a losing streak. He sided with the Net music-swapping service Napster Inc. in its doomed court battle against the record companies, which sued for copyright violations. He backed hackers who posted code on the Web that let people duplicate movie DVDs. A court nixed that. And he sided with the government in its antitrust case against Microsoft Corp. The initial ruling to break up Microsoft is expected to be reversed on appeal.

Wait a second. Doesn't Linux reside mostly on servers, the powerful computers that run data centers, publish Web pages, and drive corporate networks? Until recently, the answer was yes. However, Tux the Penguin -- Linux' mascot -- has escaped from the server closet and is now waddling across a much wider expanse of the technology landscape.

• "One percentage point of productivity growth can eliminate up to 1.3 million jobs a year"

• "Of the 2.7 million jobs lost over the past three years, only 300,000 have been from outsourcing, according to Forrester Research Inc."

Joe doesn't know any local linux geeks that'll come fix something for a 6 pack of Duff

Maybe if he tried offering Gunniess instead, he would get a better reception?

Oh come on, it's not like you haven't sat down with $RELATIVE_FROM_USA to fix $COMPUTER_PROBLEM and been offered something like crudwiser. Ick.

Refined tastes on technology need not imply a favoritism to non-domestic American beverages. But this is an important facet of software that people leave out: culture.

I view that whole problem with software is not about the number of machines installed. The problem is about people, attitudes and perceptions.

I feel that addressing the difference of community will be the single most challenging task facing popular adoption of tools like Linux. The OS installed on a user's computer is a choice of that user. It is up to you to change that user's attitude. They will put up with horrid quality when they don't know of a better alternative.

In my opinion culture clash between 'Joe Sixpack Windows-User' and everybody else is dramatic. Both the Apple and $FREE_OS communities like to view themselves as fringe or special groups. They celebrate their difference from the mainstream. Pure and unadulterated Windows users form a different community than the users of Apple or $FREE_OS products. They belive the tools they have work and work adequately. The common users are people who are sufficiently content with their pre-packaged choice to not look outside the beige box. Due to bad practices by Microsoft, they also form the largest community of individual personal computer users.

It has been said that the I.Q. of a group is the lowest I.Q. of the members of the group divided by the number of members of that group (think communication overhead when talking with slow people.) Fortunately for the 'Aunt Tillies' of the world, individual users can have quite a solid grasp of basic computer skills. Unfortunately, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance imply a lot of ineria.

While 'Aunt Tillie, CTO/CFO' grasps software quality, their grasp may be of the level of the average car buyer. This is a person who only needs to know about various cars during the rare purchase of a car. In the M$ dominated media of software boxes at your local $MEGA_MART, communicating the benefits of something like Linux or Apple over Microsoft products will require overcoming the established noise level of $ billions in marketing

This is why Microsoft is 50% marketing. This is why commercial Linux distributions are a Good Thing. This is why Apple is still here. The best hackers of the world have been excellent social engineers before anything else. It's time to put that 'social' part to a very good use.

Social engineering of the common man to want quality in software, rather than just settling for third best is possible. After helping run a student organization for Linux users for a few years, I have seen remarkable progress in the quality of various distributions. However, problems with GUI's, driver availability and application compatibility are but small technical hurdles that can be solved with adequate coding.

If you care about software quality then talk to you neighbor. Show off your computers. Maybe even offer them a Guinness while you watch DVDs on your PC with those neighbors. Get the word out.

Later this year, it plans to begin a new marketing campaign, dubbed internally as Windows XP Reloaded.

Go read Clayton Christensens book Innovators Dilemma about disruptive Technologies and you will realize that the Improvement trajectory of Linux is much steeper than Windows.

As a matter of fact this is the crux of the problem for Microsoft.

They WILL loose even on the desktop as they are can only move up but at a slow rate. Linux and their MS' predatory practices has foiled them on the lower end, like Handheld and Mobile phones. Sony has then checked on the Entertainment / Game avenue. They have nowhere to go

The article calls it "the Navy's ship", but it's leased from an Australian shipbuilder for $21M. Per year? With the Navy, more like per mile, nautical or otherwise. And why does the US government not just buy it, rather than assume the cost of financing? Is it corporate welfare, or more Bollinger pork? Yet another tax cheat? Or just a worthwhile diversion of money to offshore allies in Iraq War Jr, while bankrupting American promises to "support our troops"? Maybe Halliburton's got an Australian shipyard to catch some of the bankrupt US Treasury money that somehow escapes the Iraqmire...