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Google rakes in a billion dollars a year -- netting $100M (penultimate paragraph). Half a million is impulse-buying gum-and-candy pocket money to them.

As for having enough disk space -- these people have already cached the entire internet. I'd say they have plenty of firepower in this area.

To those who are worried that they'll do something sinister with their access to your mail -- who's to say that whoever you're using now (whether freemail, regular POP3, or anything else (even links in the traceroute chain from sender to recipient)) aren't already peeking?

Now that I think about it, all this stuff about income taxes and sales taxes masks a real problem: corporate tax evasion.

Hell, even Warren Buffett thinks that something is up. According to him, federal income taxes paid by all U.S. companies fell by 16 percent, from 1995 to 2003. I'd say, forget about the small fries and target the big multinational corporations that are siphoning off funds, and leaving the rest of us taxpayers with the bill.

I think this is really a language issue. We aren't speaking the same language. When these MBA IT types talk about information systems they aren't talking about hardware or software. They are talking about some abstract business school concept that has something to do (I think) with creating effective systems (in the traditional sense of the word) to manage information in business. Computers and software are just part of that, and these days a large part of that.

So, I'm sure that they basically learn nothing about actual hardware and software in business school beyond Microsoft as the market leader. But to be fair, here are a couple of articles from the kind of stuff that MBAs read on the plane:

Business 2.0 says Linux is ready for the desktop
Business week seems to think sco is fighting a losing battle

If IT execs are really thinking for themselves and doing the research (which, judging from the pace of linux adoption they are) they are making the right choices. But, there a lot of idiots out there and I don't think that there business school is why they don't get it.

Will the threat of SCO litigation slow down Linux adoption?
Not likely. The lawsuits have been in the air for a year now, yet sales of Linux-based servers continue to pick up steam. In the fourth quarter of 2003, they grew 51% over the same quarter last year, according to Gartner. In comparison, sales of Windows servers were up 15.9%, and Unix servers dropped 4%. In the last two years, Linux' share of the server market has grown from 2.7% to 7%. With big computer makers like IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP ), Dell (DELL ), and now even Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) selling Linux boxes, there's little reason to think Linux will lose its momentum.

The mentioned article is actually part of a Special Report called Linux Spreads Its Wings.

I thought I remembered this story (or a similar one) here and here from 2002.

It seems that the FCC was enforcing regulations that forced cable companies to unbundle PPV and premium channels such as HBO. Reading through the second article it seems that this current call for change is what people were asking for all along. Both the calls for changes and reasons for not going al a carte are given.

I would say that said enforcement hasn't made much of a difference in the last two years.

import serial

def init(timeout=0.5):
ser = serial.Serial(0) #open first serial port
ser.baudrate = 1200
ser.bytesize = serial.SEVENBITS
ser.parity=serial.PARITY_NONE
ser.stopbits = serial.STOPBITS_ONE
ser.timeout=timeout
ser.xonxoff=0
ser.rtscts=0
ser.open()
g=ser.read(30)

return ser

def tobin(val):
retret=[]
for c in val:
value=ord(c)
ret=[]
for i in range(8):
a=pow(2,i)
ret.append((value & a)>0)
retret.append(ret)

return retret

def read(ser):
g=ser.read(1)

if g=='':
return None

while ord(g) & 64 == 0:
g=ser.read(1)

g=g+ser.read(2)

if len(g)==3:
vals=tobin(g)
l=vals[0][5]
r=vals[0][4]
x=vals[0][1]*-128+vals[0][0]*64+vals[1][5]*32+vals [1][4]*16+vals[1][3]*8+vals[1][2]*4+vals[1][1]*2+v als[1][0]
y=vals[0][3]*-128+vals[0][2]*64+vals[2][5]*32+vals [2][4]*16+vals[2][3]*8+vals[2][2]*4+vals[2][1]*2+v als[2][0]
#print "L:%d R:%d X:%d Y:%d" % (l,r,x,y)
return x,y,l,r
else:
return None

def flush(ser):
ser.flush()

#ser=init()
#while 1:
# read()

"You know, fascists used mobs. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and all you need to do is fool them at the right time and get them out to act on that. So I wouldn't confuse the democratization of the Internet with necessarily healthy activity for democracy. That would be projecting magical thinking onto the technology."

- Howard Rheingold

Despite great internal IT, Wal-Mart has been on the defensive online for years. The real test will be when someone like Amazon, with reccomendation engines and customer reviews and a collection of editorial reviews, joins the fray.

As I recall the intrusion went unnoticed for a long time (at least for SourceForge) and when it was discovered SF threw out a long-winded press release that detailed how the break-in had been "detected immediately" and had not "compromised" anything of value.

So it wouldn't be the first time.

Yep, GNU/Savannah (the "really free" alternative to SF) was rooted along with the rest of the GNU/Infrastructure a few months ago. It was GNU/Terrible.

I'd just as soon not see SF.net hacked. They provide a valuable service and they manage to actually make a living at it. Actually I'd rather not see anything related to FOSS cracked and rooted.

But I do find it hilarious that whenever something like this happens the Slashbots come out of the woodwork to post things like "Oh M$ is teh worse!!1" and promptly get modded up to +5, Insightful. Of course, Linux is perfect and absolutely secure, and the crap posted on linuxsecurity.com is all lies. Blatant lies.

Ah well. The higher you think you are the more it will hurt when you hit the ground.

Actually according to Business Week Bill Gates is the world's biggest philanthropist.

Whatever the price to the customer, the retailers will still be charged 65 cents a song by the monopoly that ultimately controls the music they sell. So there is a lower limit if the sellers want to stay profitable.

If only the author of the article had gotten of a with of this neat little iPod + File Sharing idea.

There's just something lacking in a show that focuses on such riveting legal issues as "should a player with a super-accurate bionic eye be allowed to play professional baseball?"

Yet another case ripped from the headlines

Actually, seek times tend to improve the smaller the disk. It's less mass to move, over a shorter distance. Seagate claims their new 2.5" 10k RPM server-class drive has a 15% faster seek speed than 3.5" drives.

The book The Innovator's Dilemma has a great case study of hard drives, from 14", 8", 5.25", 3.5", 2.5", and beyond and explains why the advantages that each smaller size offers (and why virtually none of the companies that are best at one size manage to sell well into the next smaller size). It's a great book.

You could just stay at home and earn Indian wages

Yep, you are missing something.

Like, why was Microsoft talking to anyone about funding for TSG? How can a monopoly justify interfering in any way attacks on possible competitors?

Like, what difference does it make if the executive was not BG or SB? Those are not the only executives at MSFT, and they are not the only executives capable of committing MSFT to some kind of deal with BayStar.

Like, according to a link posted somewhere above (this one) Microsoft was one of the ten top investors in BayStar, so any investment by BayStar MAY have a Microsoft thumbprint on it.

Like "A Microsoft spokesman says that the company has no "direct or indirect" financial relations with BayStar" despite the pdf file linked to above found on BayStar's web site.

Nice shot at trolling, but better luck next time...

An Open Society Online? Not Yet

eBay's Patient Bid on China

An Open Society Online? Not Yet

eBay's Patient Bid on China

An Open Society Online? Not Yet

eBay's Patient Bid on China

Dell did it first. Whether Apple took the idea or not is as relevant as whether Dell's iDell MP3 Player is a clone of Apple's iPod. Apple did the iPod first, so you can pretty much assume.

The whole reason Dell was a Wall Street darling in the mid-late 90's was that they were the first to truly embrace the Internet as a powerful selling tool, even before Amazon and Ebay. They started the "configure online" craze because they didn't have any brick-and-mortar stores and didn't want to hire more phone operators than necessary. Thus they kept their costs down and their profits high.

Everybody else selling things online has to some degree copied what Dell did in the beginning.

But the guy didn't write a post, he wrote a frigging Bible. If you are ready to ignore the rest of his novel because you don't believe one line of non-important crap, you are looking for reasons to ignore his post and support apple and you prove him right when he says apple users "can't handle the truth" (paraphrasing). Especially when it takes one minute to go to dell.com and see the specs available for yourself.

Too lazy to find anything but one link

Found in Business Week online, this article Rescuing Reuters: "Yankee and Tower are on the block." I believe Reuters stake in Yankee Group is 51%. A shame they're dumping it, considering how nicely Yankee complements the half-truths and corporate pr mongering of Reuters alleged news reporting.

Look, I'ma War President [smirk]. Since 9/11, we realized we can't sit around waiting for things to happen. We need to act now. Al Queda operatives are trying to destroy America. Saddam was a dangerous evil dictator. By hurting big business, the terrorists will win. Democrats want to let the terrorists win, tax corporations and put "Queer Eye" reruns on C-Span. These are things we know.

Now, I don't know about you, but that last election? Where people say I didn't win [lip curl], even though the U.S. Supreme Court had run out the clock to make sure I did [grin]? Well, I felt bad when I heard those poor old, octogenarian Jews in Palm Beach County get all confused over the Butterfly ballots.

Now, with those electric voting machines? We can just flip a switch and turn those confused votes into the proper votes. We don't have time to wait around for the machines to be modified to keep paper records. At least not until after the re-election [smirk].

I have been assured by all the electric voting systems companies, all great supporters of the Republican Party, that their machines are in perfect working order and don't need audits or a paper trail to mess things up. Don't let the terrorists win!

Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (book teaser) My favorite chapter was The Case Of The Missing NAND Gate.

I can't believe nobody's mentioned the HP CapShare.

Link
Picture

I was doing some consulting for a lawyer in 1999, and he showed me some 'new' HP scanner he just got for some outrageous price. He told me they didn't even have it in the stores/catalogs. It was a very 'James Bond' device, you could swipe it over a large page, and the image was automatically stitched together. You could store/view pages on the scanner, or send them to an HP printer or a laptop via IR. Very cool.

eBay has a couple of them for sale.

I can't believe nobody's mentioned the HP CapShare.

Link
Picture

I was doing some consulting for a lawyer in 1999, and he showed me some 'new' HP scanner he just got for some outrageous price. He told me they didn't even have it in the stores/catalogs. It was a very 'James Bond' device, you could swipe it over a large page, and the image was automatically stitched together. You could store/view pages on the scanner, or send them to an HP printer or a laptop via IR. Very cool.

eBay has a couple of them for sale.

"In his spare time, billionaire Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) co-founder Paul G. Allen plays the guitar in a rock band called Grown Men." - BusinessWeek

On the contrary, SCO apparently earned the title of most hated company in tech according to BW Online. Ransom Love must cry himself to sleep at night...

Judging by, among others, these articles in Slate (here and here); these articles regarding an Eisner biography (here and here); this little gossipy titbit; and this critical letter of resignation from Roy E. Disney, the dissatisfaction with Eisner seems to have been brewing for quite some time.

So Disney has announced a DRM-licensing deal with Microsoft, and now M$-Comcast has made a public offer for Disney.

Hmm ...

Yeah, I see these things eventually ending up in the same box of junk as the NewsCatcher I bought back in 1996 or 1997. For those of you who don't remember, these were a flash-in-the-pan whiz-bang pyramid-shaped device that plugged into a free serial port and received little news bits over a nationwide pager network. The software would then pop up little news items from time to time so you could feel like you were plugged into the pulse of the world. For some reason I was obsessed with owning one of these back then and spent $99 on one. What the hell was I thinking?

At the close of 1996, AAPL had 1.7 billion is cash. And unlike today, AAPL had about 1 billion in debt plus other liabilities. And S&P indicated that 5 months later (May 5, 1997), Apple's net cash position was $374 million after "net losses of more than $1.6 billion over the past 18 months".

So I'd say that the situation was pretty dire. Maybe AAPL could have kept burning through their cash for longer than 3 months, but it doesn't look like they could have lasted more than 1 year. Three months of life before financial collapse looks entirely possible. Something had to be done in the summer of 1997 or Apple would have been toast.

Steve Jobs did an absolutely amazing job saving this company.

d

I screwed up the link to the article at Businessweek. Here is thearticle from 1999 I was referring to.

As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell. Nobody is going to want to pay for software let alone software which is strictly limited in variety.

The cost to consumer of Windows XP Home when bundled with a computer from one of the major players is about $50. Yes the source is Balmer, so believe it as you like. As part of a $1500 computer, the price issue is pretty irrelevant. I think saying Linux is free on the desktop really won't get too many buyers to switch. The only thing that would catalyze a switch would be a pretty dramatic disparity in quality (Linux desktop would have to be much, much better than Windows in all respects to get people to get over the hump of switching costs).

Corporate customers (who should be price sensitive) aren't switching b/c of the price issue, they're switching because a) it's cool to push the envelope in certain IT cultures b) they believe the savings will come from having a more stable infrastructure-- ie dissatisfaction with MS products...

I think the Linux switch will happen on the desktop, but cost won't be the driving factor.

Do Mac ethusiasts have selective memory? Apple was hurting badly when Microsoft made the investment. For example this article is from April of 1996 detailing Apple's cash reserves had plummeted to $592 million and had huge quarterly losses. The iMac (undoubtably the machine that saved Apple from bankruptcy) wasn't released until August 1998. Microsoft's $150 million investment was in August 1997 according to this articles.

As a Mac user myself, I'm more than willing to thank Microsoft for giving Apple a much needed shot in the arm cash-wise. That money most likely meant the difference between Apple folding and Apple shipping it's most successful computer line in the last 10 years. Don't take my word for it either, go read the articles for yourself. They were written before we even knew the iMac or iBook or iAnything was coming down the pike and they forecast a dire end to Apple. Amelio was running the company into the ground and thankfully Jobs, whether you love him or hate him, came along just in time to save the day (with a little help from Microsoft cash-wise).

...the PowerMac G5 microchip processor series sucks up a huge amount of power and puts out enough heat to burn toast. The power is not an issue when you can plug your machine into a wall. But to cool down the G5 box, Apple resorted to an anodized aluminum chassis and space-age cooling system using nine -- count 'em, nine -- different fans to keep the machine copacetic.

Actually, in a recent edition of BusinessWeek they were doing a roundup on outsourcing in American, and they cited quite a few examples of governmental outsourcing to India. I think one example was NJ state, and another was a regional gov't in Ohio.

This comment was specifically mentioned in a BusinessWeek article, and the comment wasn't even modded up?
Hmmm....Boggle.

Any money sent outside the country, bad for US economy. That simple.

Are you really arguing that all imports are harmful to the US economy? Even Pat Buchanan would likely disagree.

It's giving away wealth.

No, it's exchanging one form of wealth (currency) for another (goods and services). Are you "giving away wealth" when you buy a car? Of course not; you're getting a product that you value more than the money that it costs. This makes you wealthier. And it doesn't matter whether the car was made in Michigan, Japan, or Mexico.

IT salaries won't fall. Understand that.

They will, and are. (Note that I disagree with the article's unsupported conclusion that "on the negative side, America's standard of living would inevitably decline.")

The attack on SCO is a useless outrage but the reaction can be many times worse than you imagine.

It hurts because the attack itself is futile. No one cares about SCO's crummy little corporate billboard, least of all SCO. They have admitted to being on the way out. You can't hurt SCO more than dead, so this attack can only help them by lending undeserved public sympathy. Some people without a clue might even buy into SCO's propaganda about the free software world being out to get them instead of simply ignoring them till they die.

We will learn the truth of this when they catch the 13 year old who has the Windoze skills required to write the virus. Real free software advocates and programmers have much better things to do than use M$ computers to screw the net and SCO. The worst would be for Microsoft to have bought an agent provocateur who will say all sorts of crazy things when caught.

Peren's and other's Richstag fire fears are well founded in the result of previous worms. Is it a co-incidence that Bill Gates stood up the other day to promise us all a bright sunny spam free future if only he could specify the way email works? I doubt it! Previous Microsoft born diseases have been used by major ISPs to further enfoce the comercial software world's artificial distinction between "servers" and "clients" on the internet. Ports have been blocked to prevent normal services, such as email, html, ftp and others so that only scofflaw P2P applications can function. I fear that this silly worm will be used to ban free software and re-work email so that it becomes the corporate controled mess that some companies and governments want it to be. I'm afraid now. Are you?

Powerful intrests are striking back. The "In Soviet Russia" and other nasty trolls are doubtlessly printed up by gangs of paid PR drones, but CNN does not write about them or Steve Barkto. The real war of words has been launched against free software. They are going to try to make it look like free software "echo boxes" have created terrorist like fanatics who are causing real harm.

I know of many US companies who make a living teaching companies in other countries like India about quality control and the way that US Businesses do business. If Indian companies had good quality, these companies would be out of business and not have business booming. I shall cite some examples of the quality of offshoring below.

Thing is, most IT workers, such as me, do not blame the people taking our jobs, but the companies making the move to other countries and cutting us loose. This is a global trend that is not going to stop unless there is some law passed against it, which I doubt will happen.

First it was a Labor Shortage which was a big lie by the Corporations to get rid of US workers and replace them with H1B Visa workers or outsource to India. Now that there is a surplus of IT Workers, they still claim there is an IT shortage and need to move more jobs overseas.

Where is the beef? Where is the quality that Indian companies are supposed to have? Apparently they did not have Quality at Dell when they moved a Help Desk over to India. Where is the quality in programs written? Security issues are a big risk and we are supposed to trust someone we cannot even watch from half a world away that they will not harm source code or be a risk to security?

Of course there is always hidden Malware to consider. Really nice of them to put in a back door or virus or trojan to access the corp system after the Indian programmers are let go when the project is over.

Oh yeah, the myth that it is cheaper. Consider the Hidden costs of Ofshoring nothing like a project going over budget and full of bugs and needing US developers to fit it. Once again, where is the beef? That quality is just not there once again.

It seems that India is America's silent partner. We may not even hear about it during the election year. When a government is more interested in rewriting copyright laws so that the RIAA can sue 13 year-old girls and fair use is out of the picture, I wonder who our politicians really work for? Certainly not the US Citizens, only Corporations. So of course they support the wholesale slaughter of US IT Workers and the export of IT jobs overseas.

Ah but there is a big risk involved in Offshoring. Sort of like taking all the company stock to Las Vegas and betting it all on number 35 on the Roulette Wheel. :) Just ask those who craft the contracts about the risks involved.

Nice to meet the people that are taking the jobs moved to India. Also nice to know they are not concerned that US Workers are losing their jobs to keep the Indian workers employed. I'd think if I was given a job at someone else's expense that I would quote my religious or culutral references instead as well when asked to respond to that. :)

Maybe we should personalize the US IT Workers too. Here is Bob, he worked for a Fortune 500 company for the past 15 years developing award winning programs and his work gained the company many patents. Bob holds a Masters in Information Systems. Management decided that he earns too much, so he was terminated and his job was sent with many others over to an IT sweatshop i

Q: Have you had direct talks with customers yet?
A: Very carefully over the last quarter, instead of sending out mass invoices, we stepped very carefully and really had a lot of direct one-on-one meetings with 15 or so companies. In the process of doing that, we learned a lot. We listened. We talked. And we went back and forth. About 20% of those companies signed licenses with us.

15 companies x 20% = 3

So, ABOUT 3 companies have signed the licenses. I'm inspired. I'm going to throw money at SCO and drive up their stock even further.

THE MICROSOFT FACTOR

But who stands to gain the most from an SCO win? Microsoft. Linux is the primary force standing between Microsoft and domination of the computer world. The software giant is happily fanning customers' fears with an anti-Linux campaign while pumping money into SCO. Even though neither company has disclosed a dollar figure, sources close to SCO say Microsoft has spent more than $12 million on SCO licenses. Microsoft says it needs the licenses because it sells technology that allows its customers to run applications that were designed for Unix, the operating system Linux was modeled on. Critics believe it is just helping SCO finance its lawsuit.

The BusinessWeek/Information Technology/Online Extra is pretty slick. As I read it, it appears that if McBribe is a cornered rat, then it's by his own devices.

Within 30 days he leaps into action. He then sandbags IBM after he sends out a Shareholder's letter ... ... I mean, usually you don't play such a public game unless you've failed at some backroom negotiation. Not the case here, according to the interview.

Then he get's all pissy, claming IBM goes ballistic when Big Blue flexes it's muscles.

The more I read about this the more and more it's clear to me that McBribe isn't leading this company into profitability, but a death march ... ... but not until he first sucks out ever red cent from any possible revenue stream without actually creating any new product, or continually modifying the old one.

Sounds to me like SCO has no one to blame but themselves here.

Businessweek on SCO

From the article in the link

The Next Big Thing For Wireless?

The Next Big Thing For Wireless? WiMax is a lot faster than Wi-Fi and has a bigger range -- but success isn't assured

Everywhere you turn these days, there seems to be a new way to zap data through the ether: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G. Now comes yet another addition to this alphabet soup, a technology that can blast data seven times faster and up to a thousand times farther than popular Wireless Fidelity, or Wi-Fi, systems. Officially called IEEE 802.16 but marketed under the sexier moniker WiMax, it's bound to be a hot topic this year, thanks to aggressive backing from chip giant Intel (INTC ) and support from equipment makers such as Nokia (NOK ) and Alcatel (ALA ). The first WiMax gear should be on the market by the end of 2004.

Think of it as Wi-Fi on steroids. While Wi-Fi hotspots have a radius of about 100 feet, WiMax uses state-of-the-art microwave radio technology to span distances as great as 30 miles. That means it could be used as an alternative to copper wire and coaxial cable for connecting homes and businesses to the Internet. If it flies, WiMax could reinvigorate competition between dominant telecom and cable companies and rivals using a whole new infrastructure -- not just leasing space on existing networks. "This is the next telecom revolution," says Rudy Leser, vice-president of marketing for Tel Aviv-based Alvarion Ltd. (ALVR ), the leading maker of broadband wireless equipment.

That's just for starters. The real buzz about WiMax is that Intel Corp. is aiming to shrink the technology down to a chip so that it can be built directly into PCs and laptops. Intel did the same thing for Wi-Fi with its Centrino mobile processor line and helped accelerate the Wi-Fi boom. Analysts figure WiMax laptops could show up by 2006, letting people get on the Net wirelessly virtually anywhere. "If you like Wi-Fi, you're going to love Wi-Fi everywhere," says Sean M. Maloney, general manager of the Intel Communications Group. Pyramid Research LLC of Cambridge, Mass., figures that nearly 4 million people will be using such "broadband wireless" technology by 2008. Revenues from broadband wireless services -- mostly based on WiMax -- could top $2.1 billion annually by that time.

If all of this sounds like a marketing pitch from the 1990s bubble, it should. Telecom startups such as Winstar LLC (IDT ) and Teligent Inc. went broke trying to sell similar wireless technology to businesses and homes. But WiMax has a big cost advantage. The boom-era startups used proprietary equipment that cost as much as $1,200 for every customer site -- three times as much as early WiMax products are expected to. Thanks to standardization, prices should plunge even further in the future, to less than $200 for the gear that sits at the customer's site. Then, when WiMax migrates into laptops, the cost to buy into it will edge toward zero.

Still, success is hardly assured. The biggest question is whether even gung-ho techies need another technology to tap the Net. Wired broadband is widely available in homes and businesses in the U.S., Western Europe, and parts of Asia. The rapidly spreading Wi-Fi provides speedy Web links on the go. And wireless companies are rolling out ever-faster ways for their customers to tap the Net. On Jan. 8, for instance, U.S. giant Verizon Communications I

From the article in the link

The Next Big Thing For Wireless?

The Next Big Thing For Wireless? WiMax is a lot faster than Wi-Fi and has a bigger range -- but success isn't assured

Everywhere you turn these days, there seems to be a new way to zap data through the ether: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G. Now comes yet another addition to this alphabet soup, a technology that can blast data seven times faster and up to a thousand times farther than popular Wireless Fidelity, or Wi-Fi, systems. Officially called IEEE 802.16 but marketed under the sexier moniker WiMax, it's bound to be a hot topic this year, thanks to aggressive backing from chip giant Intel (INTC ) and support from equipment makers such as Nokia (NOK ) and Alcatel (ALA ). The first WiMax gear should be on the market by the end of 2004.

Think of it as Wi-Fi on steroids. While Wi-Fi hotspots have a radius of about 100 feet, WiMax uses state-of-the-art microwave radio technology to span distances as great as 30 miles. That means it could be used as an alternative to copper wire and coaxial cable for connecting homes and businesses to the Internet. If it flies, WiMax could reinvigorate competition between dominant telecom and cable companies and rivals using a whole new infrastructure -- not just leasing space on existing networks. "This is the next telecom revolution," says Rudy Leser, vice-president of marketing for Tel Aviv-based Alvarion Ltd. (ALVR ), the leading maker of broadband wireless equipment.

That's just for starters. The real buzz about WiMax is that Intel Corp. is aiming to shrink the technology down to a chip so that it can be built directly into PCs and laptops. Intel did the same thing for Wi-Fi with its Centrino mobile processor line and helped accelerate the Wi-Fi boom. Analysts figure WiMax laptops could show up by 2006, letting people get on the Net wirelessly virtually anywhere. "If you like Wi-Fi, you're going to love Wi-Fi everywhere," says Sean M. Maloney, general manager of the Intel Communications Group. Pyramid Research LLC of Cambridge, Mass., figures that nearly 4 million people will be using such "broadband wireless" technology by 2008. Revenues from broadband wireless services -- mostly based on WiMax -- could top $2.1 billion annually by that time.

If all of this sounds like a marketing pitch from the 1990s bubble, it should. Telecom startups such as Winstar LLC (IDT ) and Teligent Inc. went broke trying to sell similar wireless technology to businesses and homes. But WiMax has a big cost advantage. The boom-era startups used proprietary equipment that cost as much as $1,200 for every customer site -- three times as much as early WiMax products are expected to. Thanks to standardization, prices should plunge even further in the future, to less than $200 for the gear that sits at the customer's site. Then, when WiMax migrates into laptops, the cost to buy into it will edge toward zero.

Still, success is hardly assured. The biggest question is whether even gung-ho techies need another technology to tap the Net. Wired broadband is widely available in homes and businesses in the U.S., Western Europe, and parts of Asia. The rapidly spreading Wi-Fi provides speedy Web links on the go. And wireless companies are rolling out ever-faster ways for their customers to tap the Net. On Jan. 8, for instance, U.S. giant Verizon Communications I

From the article in the link

The Next Big Thing For Wireless?

The Next Big Thing For Wireless? WiMax is a lot faster than Wi-Fi and has a bigger range -- but success isn't assured

Everywhere you turn these days, there seems to be a new way to zap data through the ether: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G. Now comes yet another addition to this alphabet soup, a technology that can blast data seven times faster and up to a thousand times farther than popular Wireless Fidelity, or Wi-Fi, systems. Officially called IEEE 802.16 but marketed under the sexier moniker WiMax, it's bound to be a hot topic this year, thanks to aggressive backing from chip giant Intel (INTC ) and support from equipment makers such as Nokia (NOK ) and Alcatel (ALA ). The first WiMax gear should be on the market by the end of 2004.

Think of it as Wi-Fi on steroids. While Wi-Fi hotspots have a radius of about 100 feet, WiMax uses state-of-the-art microwave radio technology to span distances as great as 30 miles. That means it could be used as an alternative to copper wire and coaxial cable for connecting homes and businesses to the Internet. If it flies, WiMax could reinvigorate competition between dominant telecom and cable companies and rivals using a whole new infrastructure -- not just leasing space on existing networks. "This is the next telecom revolution," says Rudy Leser, vice-president of marketing for Tel Aviv-based Alvarion Ltd. (ALVR ), the leading maker of broadband wireless equipment.

That's just for starters. The real buzz about WiMax is that Intel Corp. is aiming to shrink the technology down to a chip so that it can be built directly into PCs and laptops. Intel did the same thing for Wi-Fi with its Centrino mobile processor line and helped accelerate the Wi-Fi boom. Analysts figure WiMax laptops could show up by 2006, letting people get on the Net wirelessly virtually anywhere. "If you like Wi-Fi, you're going to love Wi-Fi everywhere," says Sean M. Maloney, general manager of the Intel Communications Group. Pyramid Research LLC of Cambridge, Mass., figures that nearly 4 million people will be using such "broadband wireless" technology by 2008. Revenues from broadband wireless services -- mostly based on WiMax -- could top $2.1 billion annually by that time.

If all of this sounds like a marketing pitch from the 1990s bubble, it should. Telecom startups such as Winstar LLC (IDT ) and Teligent Inc. went broke trying to sell similar wireless technology to businesses and homes. But WiMax has a big cost advantage. The boom-era startups used proprietary equipment that cost as much as $1,200 for every customer site -- three times as much as early WiMax products are expected to. Thanks to standardization, prices should plunge even further in the future, to less than $200 for the gear that sits at the customer's site. Then, when WiMax migrates into laptops, the cost to buy into it will edge toward zero.

Still, success is hardly assured. The biggest question is whether even gung-ho techies need another technology to tap the Net. Wired broadband is widely available in homes and businesses in the U.S., Western Europe, and parts of Asia. The rapidly spreading Wi-Fi provides speedy Web links on the go. And wireless companies are rolling out ever-faster ways for their customers to tap the Net. On Jan. 8, for instance, U.S. giant Verizon Communications I

Also in the news, e-books from Amazon will obiliterate the printed book market, grocery delivery services will annihilate the brick and mortar grocery stores, DigiScent smelling PC devices are the next video cards, broadband video retails are the wave of the future, and PointCast rocks.

(I'd have thrown in more digitally oriented links, but the websites are all, well, gone)

Sometime in the 80's, manufacturers found that the American consumer would pay for cheaper products that don't last as long. There are still some people who would rather pay more for a product that lasts longer, but a company can't build two separate products for the same niche...so the "extended warranty" was created for the latter group, who wanted some assurance of a longer product life.

Unfortunately, the presence of an extended warranty has no effect on the quality of the product itself. It's just a way for a manufacturer or a retailer to use one product to appeal to both audiences.

This is somewhat related to product enhancement...in the 80's and 90's, people saw their computers becoming "obsolete" so fast that the working lifespan of the physical product wasn't an issue. In the last few years, many people have started realizing that what they have is good enough. But America is in love with cheap consumer electronics, and the manufacturers have adjusted accordingly.

slightly o.t.: I remember an experiment Sears did with screwdrivers -- they carried USA-made ones that they'd been selling for years, at several dollars each. Alongside, they sold similar screwdrivers, made in China, for $1 each. Both carried the famous Sears lifetime replacement guarantee. I'm sure the rate of return on the latter was higher, but not enough to impact profits -- because they're still selling them.