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cool--what this guy has built is similar in nature to the 'bombardier embrio' concept motorbike.

articles with pics here and here

Yes the XBox division made their first profit. A better question is: "Do people still justify buying an Xbox by saying 'I am helping Microsoft lose money'"?? I doesn't bother me if you want a Xbox but stop lying to yourself that you aren't supporting Microsoft.

being a monopoly that controls over 90% of the worlds computers, the chance of it being "on the decline" in any meaningful (i.e.: financial) sense is zero. the "amusing" thing about the profit report (i.e.: microsoft raking in the dough from it's monopoly despite the rest of the economy still going down the toilet) is to contrast it with the hyping of their new anti-piracy program:

David Lazar, a director of the Windows Genuine Advantage program, says piracy has cost Microsoft "billions of dollars over the past ten years."

of course, the two are not contradictory -- i'm sure piracy has impact microsoft to some degree -- but the contrast suggests that the harm caused by having thousands of unpatchable (since the owners are not going to be stupid enough to sign up for a visit from the spa) and exploited systems on the internet outweighs the impact on their profit margin.

here and here and here.

All of these talk about NPP (net production). On the NASA image, it the relative picture is misleading since there is not that much NPP in the tundra or deserts!

Anyway, the 50% is not made up. 50% of all land plant growth equievelence seems close to being accurate. The oceans are quite baren now (and the volume of the Pacific is equal to the volume of the Moon). Now that China is getting fat, we can only see the NPP skyrocket (meat calorie production requires about 9x plant calorie input).

As someone said, "People are not pigs. People will eat anything".

1. Terrorists storm a reactor and try to steal uranium or plutonium to make bombs.

Not likely. Assuming attackers could shoot their way past the beefed-up phalanx of armed guards, traffic barriers and guard towers that now surround every nuclear plant, they'd still have to fight their way into the reactor building through multiple levels of remote-activated blast doors--where access requires the right key card and palm print--to get to the spent-fuel pond, says Michael Wallace, president of Constellation Energy's generation group, which operates five nuclear reactors. The pond is where highly radioactive used fuel sits in 14-foot-long stainless steel assemblies cooling under 40 feet of water. Terrorists couldn't just grab this stuff and run because, unshielded, it gives off a lethal dose of radiation in less than a minute. To avoid exposure, terrorists would have to force workers to use a giant crane inside the reactor to load the assemblies into huge transfer casks, then open the mammoth doors of the reactor building and use another crane to lift the cask onto a waiting truck--all the while being shot at by the National Guard.

And While we are at it, How about crashing a plane into the reactor?

2. Terrorists crash a plane into a reactor, leading to overheating and a meltdown.

Even less likely. Assume that terrorists could get past tightened airport security and fight off passengers to get through new, improved cockpit doors and take control of a plane. Even then they'd have to crash the jet directly into a reactor to have any chance of breaking containment. In 2002 the Electric Power Research Institute performed a $1 million computer simulation to assess such a risk. Conclusion: A direct hit from a 450,000-pound Boeing 767 flying low to the ground at 350mph would ruin a plant's ability to make electricity but not break the reactor's cement shield. Reason: A reactor, smaller in profile than the Pentagon or World Trade Center, would not absorb the full force of the plane's impact. And, for all the force behind it, a plane, built of aluminum and titanium, has far less mass than the 20-foot-thick steel-and-concrete sarcophagus enclosing a nuclear reactor. It would be like dropping a watermelon on a fire hydrant from 100 feet.

Subscription required: Stopping the Bad Guys

Don't worry.

It's a hoax.

I think the Sirius CEO denied the marger.

http://www.forbes.com/2005/01/26/0126autofacescan0 4.html/

This isn't trying to denigrate your contribution to charity or Gates'. It is, though, trying to demonstrate that, even on a relative scale, you're not necessary donating as much as you think you are. "So what?" the reader may ask -- and that's the deeper point. How much you give relative to Gates doesn't matter. If people wouldn't turn charity into a wang-measuring competition, I think the world might be at least a marginally better place.

I totally agree with you, for the love of god people, it does not matter how much money does this person has, what only matters is that he is making a really BIG donation.
Now it would be interesting to make some research about the Forbes Top 10 and see how many of these men donate as much (and as often) as Mr. Gates.
I specially liked this Warren Buffett information.
At the end, this chairty is going to get to the people who does not have anything, not even a computer. Yes, we do not like the monopolyzing tactics M$ uses to eat us but, you should know, there is something more there OUTSIDE your monitor, really! and yep, there is people who does not have something to eat, or medicine to cure their illness.
I can only say, BRAVO BILL!!

I'm no fan of his business practices, but let's give the man his due. (And as international corporations go, there are a lot worse around.)

One: It's another proprietary crap-pile from Apple.

Two: You're forced to pay for MacOS X, when you'd rather just put your own Linux distro in for Free.

Three: It's $499. Considering items one and two, that's highway fucking robbery for vendor lock-in.

= 9J =

I don't think you understand what tax shelters are used for - they are used to hide gains. But Bill's not making billions of dollars a year. His net worth is tied up in stocks and investments. It's not taxes until he liquidates.

And, even if he is doing all of this charity for purely selfish reasons, you realize that even at the height of the .com boom his paper weath was, what, ~$90 billion, if I recall. So his charity encompasses a third of his net worth. (Forbes pegged his 2003 net worth at $40.7 billion.)

Once you donate more than one third of your net worth, then I think you have a right to talk some smack about Bill Gate's philantrophy - until then, you ought to respect his charity for the billions he's given to schools, AIDS research, etc. I fail to see how someone could chide his charity, even if that someone was a Linux zealot. It would be like an Arab or Jew saying Jesus did no good in his entire life.

Don't forget Dark Helmet.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0918/6608230s2.h tml
http://bruce.pennypacker.org/Andy/
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=brunner+lawsuit+ group%3Anews.admin.net-abuse.email

Yet the numbers tell a different story. You are being swindled, pal.

And your numbers are?

I'm quite well aware of people writing up reports saying that there is nothing to worry about. Some say, for example that the assumptions of the models that predict bankruptcy are excessively pessimistic. But unless you point us to what you are using as the basis for your statement that we're being swindled, we can simply assume you are just blowing rhetoric.

On the other hand, I'm looking at a $20B hedge that one of financial history's most consistent performers has placed against the dollar. That is 15% of market cap on Berkshire Hathaway. Even more interesting, that is over 50% of the company's cash position, what it really took to position that hedge (he still has the cash, but it is a real pain in the ass to manage multiple currency positions like that). He is not the only one taking short positions against the dollar, just a trader who is well known to the mainstream. In his entire career, he has only ever made one other investment of comparable magnitude, and that is when he bought GEICO, which rocketed BRK.A to the top by essentially giving him a private venture fund to capitalize purchases of other income-producing assets. There is a first time for everything, and Buffett might be wrong, but odds are he knows something you don't.

Talk is cheap, but 50% of cash in the billions backs up a metric assload of talk. And Buffett is saying we're borrowing too much. He doesn't give specific prescriptive advice, but when you look at what we are spending on well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that even if we dropped defense to zero, we still won't dig out of our hole fast enough; and that's just the public debt. You want to talk about Social Security? Sure, let's talk unfunded liabilities. You think our current public debt hole is manageable? Okay, I'll give you a hole so deep, it exceeds the total net worth of the nation. In equities terms, the "book value" of the nation cannot cover the unfunded liabilities. The Social Security and Medicare Trustees' annual reports have to be off by almost 100% to make the unfunded liabilities even match the net worth of the nation.

Naturally, when you are talking about what you owe versus what you have, prudence dictates that you don't risk more than 10% of capital on any one class of expenditures. So you probably want the Trustees to be off by a factor of 10 to be relatively prudent. The only reason our creditors are not running screaming in the other direction is because we don't have to pay these unfunded liabilities right away, so it is not yet impacting our ability to pay them back. It's someone else's problem at this time, in other words.

I don't know what reports you're reading, but I'm looking through the Trustees' own words. If you can point to analyses that can demonstrate how the Trustees' numbers are off by an order of magnitude, hey, I might think history is being made and Buffett will make the biggest mistake of his trading career. The swindle I believe history will write, is upon the enstupidated and innumerate American voting citizenry, for believing they can get something for nothing. Thank God that we have intrinsic strengths that have not been totally destroyed yet, so we are unlikely to see Chinese Cultural Revolution scale deprivation and slaughter when the bill comes due. But make no mistake about it. If Buffett and a hell of a lot of other traders are right, we are in for an incredibly tough, whipsaw ride starting around 2010 or so. And going on for anywhere from 5 years to possibly decades, depending upon

> Checking the Alexa rankings over the past few months, Google Groups have gone from about 7% of all Google users down to 1% as of a few moments ago.

If we assume that this Forbes article is still approximately accurate, Google gets 60 million unique users per month. One percent of that is 600,000 users.

How many percent do you think hit Froogle? Or Answers, or Catalogs? Using percent-of-total-hits as the sole deciding factor for whether to keep data or not is really not what I expect from Google.

The first commericial microwave oven was sold in 1967 so it is well out of range of this poll.

Here's a fascinating "best of the century" article by Forbes

Here's a link to an article at Forbes that questions the wisdowm of suing your own fans:
http://forbes.com/home/technology/2005/01/07/cx_ld _0107apple.html

The rumor sites were filled with speculation of an iPhone. I don't see where it all came from, since the announcement from Moto and Apple only said that they were developing iTunes for phones. I think a lot of people used this Forbes story as their source and went rampant with speculation.

HP has thus far been able to implement Fairplay AAC decoding on their Windows Media Center PC.

Motorola will be shipping cell phones that can play Fairplay AAC encoded content.

What iRiver and Zen could do (Compaq did it 20 years ago!) is reverse engineer the iPod such that their devices look like iPods when plugged into iTunes.

Why haven't they done that if the market is so lucrative and they are so bright? Compaq figured out how to reverse engineer BIOs from IBM, and people are porting Linux to the iPod.

Yes, he has toped the "Forbes CEO Approval Tracker" for the 18th month in a row. Full article here.

A Boeing 747-400, which is a modern and fuel-efficient jumbo jet,

Examples of simple Application Service Providers (ASPs) even you may use today:
- Virtual webhosting
- E-mail providors
- Online Fax providers (delivered to e-mail type)

This has been talked about for years now (practically as long as I remember the internet being around, maybe before). From an artical written in 1999, "IBM rolled out a series of new hosted business applications that support critical accounting, human resource and sales automation services for small and midsize businesses."

Really, it's just an old idea made new . In 1999 they were asking if it would work. however it sorta went by the side when it came to the sort of all-in-one solution we are talking about now due to the lack of high speed connections for enough people. There are however lots of firewall providors, managed VPNs, managed intrusion detection services, managed anti-virus and content filtering, managed vulnerability assessment and emergency response, and some that to a bit of all of the managed security.

If you want to read more about HOW they are talking about doing it here is a link to a few white papers to puruse on ISPs providing these services.

Not true. This link is a little old, but still serviceable: Dell Dominates PC Brand Repurchase Loyalty The white box makers are hurting: Dell, HP Taking Market Share From White Box PCs

• engaget
• Joongang
• Forbes

The zero dead pixel policy is currently only available in Korea.

"Known facts" on Slashdot can be difficult to nail down, and "official" even harder.

Linux's share in the W3 Schools stats is 3.1%.

White boxes may be in decline, with 40% of the market, not 70% as you suggest. Dell, HP Taking Market Share From White Box PCs (October 7, 2004) There are economies of scale.

Locally, white box builders are looking particularly sickly at the consumer level. Only one managed to get an in add in print (in a throwaway shopping paper) before Christmas.

I remember pointcast and loved it. I also remember reading stories about how corporate networks were dying on the hour every hour because so many employees installed it and it didn't have a system to randomize the update time.
http://www.forbes.com/1999/11/08/feat.html

I'm just as happy now using BlogExpress
http://usablelabs.com/productBlogExpress.html

Google for "currency" "pegged to the dollar" will give you many articles to read on the subject.

I call BS. Intel has plenty of resources to go after all kinds of different markets. Further, AMD chips do better at many other kinds of applications. Even further, Intel went so far as to rebadge very expensive Xeon chips (Pentium 4 Extremely Expensive Edition) to go after the "unimportant" gaming market. Finally, for most server usage, Opteron vastly outperforms Xeon, especially for multiprocessor servers.

Sure, the world of processors is changing, but Intel is adapting to the overall MARKET, not merely to AMD's strategies and successes.

I hope your company has a high rate of adaptation, it'll need it.

Side Note: How come you anti-globalization folks aren't applauding Intel for expaning a facility in the USA? Hmm? Where are AMD's chips made again?

Yes, that's nice, though I'm quite sure Intel made the decision based on dollars and cents rather than any warm-and-fuzzy pro America sentiment. Good PR doesn't hurt either - and Intel could sure use some. ;-)

It should also be pointed out that AMD could soon be manufacturing chips in East Fishkill, NY if Forbes is right.

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  (Byte magazine had anarticle about using an Etch-A-Sketch as a plotter back around 1980 or so.)
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  (Byte magazine had anarticle about using an Etch-A-Sketch as a plotter back around 1980 or so.)
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• Third item and its Home page.
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• Fourth item and its Home page.
  (Byte magazine had anarticle about using an Etch-A-Sketch as a plotter back around 1980 or so.)
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My father worked for Sears and Robuck for many years. One day a guy came in wanting to look at table saws. He wanted to see one run. They don't allow that, for safety reasons. So he moved on. A bit later, he came back - without an employee with him, got an extension cord off the shelf, plugged it in, ran it to the table saw, and cut his small finger off. Sears settled out of court, because the cost of going to court was too high. Those costs get passed on to customers.

Stupid liability laws hurt us all.

Naturally, the truth is somewhere in between. This is bad news for SCO's strategies. That does not mean McBride won't be able to convince his minders to hold the course and continue with litigation. Strictly speaking, at this moment, they're still convinced. Neverhteless, it's obviously a bumpy road ahead for them.

So, don't throw a victory party yet, but I think we're all entitled to spend a few minutes smirking.

The article you linked says IBM received $23.2 billion in the second quarter.

Accoring to Forbes, they have made $89.13 billion so far in 2004 (in sales).

Oh wait...

Merry X-mas to all the lawyers.

"I seriously doubt that a degradation would occurs on US soil just for anti-terrorist purpose."

Well, it was degraded until 2000, but that is no longer US policy.

excerpt (about 50%) from forbes.com

Prior to 2000, civilian GPS signals were deliberately degraded, leaving nonmilitary equipment with a margin of error of about 300 feet. But that year, then-President Bill Clinton ordered the so-called selective availability (SA) feature turned off. That made the systems the business community uses accurate to within 30 feet and sparked a lot of the increased usage we see today. Sales of civilian GPS equipment hit $4.7 billion last year, according to analyst Ron Stearns of Frost & Sullivan in San Jose, Calif., up from $3.9 billion in 2002. By 2008, nonmilitary sales could be $10.8 billion.

So far, civilian signal accuracy has held, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan; SA has remained off during the war in Iraq. An accurate GPS system for civilians and military personnel alike is now a matter of national policy, says the Interagency GPS Executive Board, a U.S. government agency, which reaffirmed its policy in a statement posted to its Web site last week.

"We are not planning to degrade GPS, and there are no plans to degrade GPS," says Jason Kim, a GPS board spokesman. "The decision to turn off SA was a serious national policy decision. Obviously it could be overruled, but no one is seriously contemplating that right now."

There are no export restrictions on civilian GPS technology, so potential U.S. enemies could easily buy the equipment and attempt to use it to their advantage. Still, it makes little sense for the U.S. to revert to the fuzzy civilian signal. Even under dire military emergencies, doing so would give U.S. forces no advantage. Terrorist attacks don't call for much navigation precision. The military has it own highly accurate tamper-proof encrypted signal that civilian equipment can't receive. ...if the U.S. needs to deny GPS use to Iraqi forces, it is understood to have the ability to do so. Glen Gibbons, a GPS analyst who also edits a technical magazine on the technology, says the Air Force can send false GPS-like signals over selected areas that would prompt civilian equipment to show incorrect position data. Says Gibbons of the military: "Their plans involve doing something in the area of operations, but not to the satellites themselves."

Mitchell E Kertzman became a director of CNET Networks in May 1996. Mr. Kertzman is a general partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. From November 1998 until March, 2003, Mr. Kertzman served as Chief Executive Officer and Director of Liberate Technologies, Inc., an information appliance and software provider. From July 1996 until November 1998, Mr. Kertzman served as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of Sybase, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise database software, which Mr. Kertzman joined in February 1995 as Executive Vice President. Prior to joining Sybase, Inc., Mr. Kertzman served as Chief Executive Officer and a director of Powersoft Corporation, an application development tools provider.Mitchell Kertzman has been listed in Forbes' America's Most Powerful People.

Wow an article on the FUTURE of Digital audio. MP3 phones! Will the miracles of early 2001 never cease?

Andru: [...] I am not expecting huge storage on these phones either, otherwise they become indirect competition to the iPod. Instead, I think we will see the phones able to port about 50 tracks.

ME: Bah! The phones will certainly be strongly branded as iPod phones, and Apple will certainly recieve licensing fees. That's not competition in any meaningful sense. In addition, time has shown that any attempt to limit a music player's usefulness arbitrarily (like a stupid 50-track limit) will certainly backfire. They say themselves later on that hard drives are great because you can store your entire music collection. If musicphones are limited to 50 tracks, I predict abject failure, and I bet the cell phone manufacturers are right with me.

Hector: With the players of the future, we will be able to schedule personal recordings of incoming broadcast music on a given hour, and play it back when we have the free time.

ME: Bah! There's already products that do this, and although they are popular in a small part of the population, Pogo is not going to upset the iPod any time soon. If you really want to see a model of the future, I'm pretty confident it's to be found in Podcasting. As traditional media middlemen grow increasingly desperate to preserve their vanishing way of life, more ways are found to completely bypass them. Podcasters are individuals who make their own audio content, and provide it for download. Why cling tenaciously to traditional audio delivery methods such as radio with its primitive 1-second-of-audio/sec transmit rate when there are better methods available? Imagine instead a few aggregation service providers and recommendation engines with links and software to help find and download the freshest Podcasts you're interested in!

Hector: I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo.

ME: I've been using my Nomad Zen in my car for two years. What's your problem, Hector? I'm not disagreeing with your desire to have a nice wireless way to hook up my Zen to my car stereo, but, dude, BO-RING. Think about this instead: When you pull your car into your garage, it uploads information about what you've been skipping over and what you like to listen to during various times and various driving styles to your home media center, which then, next time you log on to shop for music, makes recommendations, which your car stereo downloads wirelessly across your 802.11 net.

ME: Or heck, 802.11 is so ubiquitous nowadays, your car could download a track or two while you're in the supermarket parking lot (because it's a relatively big download) and store it encrypted. When you get back to the car, your heads-up display could ask if you want to buy the song. A quick purchase transaction later, you get the unencryption key, and away you go. New music on the fly.

Andru: One thing I do expect in the future, is to see flash MP3 players slowly diminish from the market. While it is more shock absorbent, I just don't see the cost of the medium as being feasible going forward, especially with hard drive prices plummetting.

ME: Buh? Maybe they haven't noticed that Flash prices are also on the move. Assuming the same size, speed, and reliability, I consider it a non-issue really.

Andru: With convergence coming into play, people are wanting to start putting pictures and video on their portable devices as well.

ME: Yes, just as Sony's Photo Walkman and Video Walkman were follow-on smash successes after the breakthrough cassette player. Oh wait. No, sorry, I was just smoking cr

Well, he is the biggest philanthropist in the world. Spending a billion dollars a year, mostly in vaccine research. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm

He has given 37% of his wealth to charity and has given more than a 1000% of what Warren Buffet, Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer, Paul Allen and Larry Ellison together.

Is that really not caring about anything else?

Here's a link to Forbes on the fact. http://www.forbes.com/philanthropy/2004/10/04/cz_e c_1004gates.html

Worry when the business press starts writing articles (free reg req.) about ways to profit from global warming.

From the Dec. 13, 2004 issue:

Denver businessman Pat Broe, owner of the subarctic port of Churchill, Canada, stands poised to profit from polar trade. Why? The ice is melting.

Sorry, but Dell does not manufacture their own PCs.

It's the old story: college campuses are becoming more and more connected. Students are getting more "internet-savvy" as they do everything online. There seems to be an overemphasis on the "connectedness" of colleges - this doesn't necessarily translate into a good educational environment. Take a look at the America's top connected universities and compare to the best universities. Two different lists.

CNN.COM:

1. Timber Cutters: 117 / 100k / yr
2. Fishers: 71 / 100k / yr
3. Airplane Pilot & Navigator: 70 / 100k / yr

Fielding's DangerFinder:

1. Truck Driver - 762 Deaths / year
2. Farm Worker
3. Retail Salesman / Supervisor

Forbes:

1. Truck Drivers - 112,200 injuries
2. Nursing Aides - 79,000 injuries

Military Casualties in Iraq:

• 1,402 deaths / 623 days
• 9,326 wounded / 623 days

• 821 deaths / 100k / yr
• 5,464 injured / 100k / yr

• 657 deaths / 100k / yr
• 4,371 injured / 100k / yr

So, I'd have to support your claim that joining the army is one of the more dangerous ways to pay for an education. But as others have said, if you stay out of the infantry, or serve during peacetime, the statistics are a lot better.

As for the payscale, Ask.com reports the starting pay is about $27k / yr. This doesn't compare favorably to the average U.S. salary of $36k / yr. Comparing a starting salary with an average covering a breadth of experience isn't fair. The average salary for someone with just a high school education is $15k / yr. So while I wouldn't say the military make much more than the average person , in some circumstances it can look pretty attractive.

The city reached an agreement with Verizon yesterday.

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2004/11/30/ap1 683445.html

There is also a a forbes article on a company, Lok Technology, seeking to replace Cisco in other market segments (traffic shaping, vpn, firewall, and more) using OpenBSD + custom app server.

I thought that he was trying too strongly to make the case that those that want to use Linux for real-time applications will not buy tools and those that want better performance for hard-real-time will not choose Linux.

It is also obvious that a general-purpose operating system is not going to work as well in a real-time environment as one specially designed for that purpose. It's the reason why, for example, if you are an organization that wants a system to break encryption keys fast, you build a special-purpose machine that includes hardware designed to do quick computations of prime numbers, not commodity hardware with lots of extra features you don't need and won't use, that slow down the primary purpose of breaking codes.

He seemed to be arguing the point far too strongly, as if he had a hidden agenda. Okay, presuming his argument is valid, so what if Linux as a general-purpose O/S is not as good at handling hard-real-time as a specially designed one? He could have argued that in about 1/5th of the space his article uses. What is also interesting is, despite all his talk about how bad Linux is, he seemed to ignore examples where Linux is considered good enough for real-time use in many cases, and was unable to mention any alternative which might be better, such as some open-source alternatives that have been mentioned here on Slashdot.

I had a suspicion but I wasn't sure. And now it's clear: his company sells real-time operating systems in competition with Linux. So he claims Linux is not good enough. Where have we heard this before? :)

Maybe not 50% of total income, but certainly 50% of taxable income is pretty easy to hit.

But we're not talking about just taxable income. A big part of the way our tax burden gets increased or decreased is by changing what's taxable. (I'm not saying it should be that way, but it is.) Standard deductions become very significant if you're talking about someone making as little as $18k.

And I find it hard to believe that someone making $18k is living in a $200k home...I think they'd end up with a lower taxable income from the mortage interest deduction, too. (If the income is that low compared to the assessment on the house, there might be homestead tax credits available.)

Look, no one likes taxes. But the fact is that overall the U.S. pays low taxes compared to other industrialized nations. Given the bizarre nature of the tax code there might be the odd degenerate case (the AMT has certainly screwed some people lately), but the allegations that typical middle-income taxpayers are paying 40-50% of their income in taxes are simply not true.