M$ Windows is an INDENSPENSIBLE product on PCs. M$ worked on making it that for years. (Don't get me started on how.)
They can relocate their headquarters and 'production' facilities ANYWHERE on this planet that gives them an advantage.
Just wait 'til Gates find out how beautiful life can be on a small island (Pitcairn's maybe) and then we can all be fucked paying thge M$ tax while they pay NONE of their own.
Its because of the hegemonic impedence mismatch between the a geographically bounded nation state and the boundaryless multi-national.
If the 'country' that a multi-national finds itself in does anything to cost it anything, it can MOVE. And the multi-national can do so with astonishing ease.
They're now arguing whether China is being humane in shooting copyright violators, not the shooting but whether using bullets is humane. Killing people for ripping copies of "The Captain and Tenille" or some other ephemera.
Multi-nationals should be out-lawed (not likely to happen, they can buy the whores in Washington, or Ottawa, or Mexico City, or Moskva or...)
OR they should be met by a uniform code of international laws which erases the relative advantages (same comment as above,)
OR we, the citizens, should be given universality of hegemony (regardless of where you live on the planet, you can choose who's national rules you live by. [If you own shares in, or work for a company that opted to establish somewhere with no taxes, but as a consequence has no health care at all, YOU don't have health care at all.])
Or what Browser. Or what mail program. Or which ports I had open on my router.
I think I'm secure with Mac OSs and Linux & Mozilla & Mac's Mail.
I know every snoop program that tries to load itself as an attachment. There's a load of shit out there, but they don't get automatically run because I'm smart and I don't run anysoftware I don't have the source code for (except for Aqua.)
"This is America and we work under the Capitalist system. If something isn't profitable it is either done away with completely or bought up by the government. Comcast wouldn't be buying up every cable company in the country to spread their influences if it wasn't profitable."
The Capitalist system is NOT the free market system. It consists of getting the MOST money for your investment.
When there is competition, prices don't necessarily drop either. It doesn't have to be collusion or price fixing either but just an assumption that the price currently charged is what can be borne by the buyers.
The profits may have been small when the infrastructure was being created but become larger and larger as time passes as the infrastructure becomes wide-spread and comoditized.
Almost everything wired will become wireless as the infrastructure becomes wide-spread. Its more convenient NOT to run miles and miles of wires when you can use "nothing" to carry the signal. ("Nothing" is FREE! It costs zero capital expenditure.)
But you do bring up the point that M$'s marketing, when unaided by antitrust strong-arm tactics to your own vendors, has spawned the most pathetically lame selling strategies and products.
With Linux, the price point is $0.00. It can't get cheaper than that. And there's no wiggle room. You can't vie for a reduced share of a market that has no financial value.
Give up Bill. You can't fight free. (That would make him into one of Olly North's freedom fighters. That would make him dead.)
You can make your money by hanging onto a diminishing market-share but there are no new opportunities for you.
Steve Jobs figured that the best computer was invisible (look at the iMac G5, look at the iPod) while being very visible as it own thing.
Think of everything they've done to push the envellope. Everything used to be sexy hardware. And damn good hardware at that. (SCSI, USB, FireWire, WiFi, BlueTooth, MC680x0->PPC601 without a hitch.) But they also made damn good software too. (OS 1..6, 7..9 & OS X)
There has always been a synergy between hardware and software. But I think that this will become more pervasive while being less distinguishable.
Look for Apple to start doing things with the larger Studio Displays to eliminate the computer.
Wall mountable intelligence, complete with BlueTooth and WiFi while 'disappearing' the CPU. Its the death of the 'box' in 'home' situations. (It won't disappear from the product grid because that's where non-home apps live.)
Your 'wired home' will have peripherals scatered through out the house, and RendezVous will keep track of them all.
The redistribution of wealth comes at a premium from base.
If the base is high, say between the US and Canada (not Mexico yet,) or across most of the EU the changes mean that "A rising tide lifts all boats." Economies progress to a higher level by building on what came before.
If the base is low, say between India and the US, the flow is the same, (economics as thermodynamics) but the changes means that you get burnt by the __rate__ of the transfer.
In effect, you have a redistribution of poverty, not one of wealth.
The current immigration policies of the US (and Canada and the EU for that matter,) albeit prejudicial, flawed and exclusionary means that the __rate__ of the transfer is occuring at a tolerable pace.
The current phenomenon of __foreign__ out-sourcing (out-sourcing ''per se'' is not is a major problem since the expense base is directly comparable and commensurate,) is the cause of all the arguments.
The comparative advantage of some labour costs is __too__ great because you're comparing Apple to oranges.
The annual GDP PER CAPITA of Malaisia or India is so much lower than the US (or Caqnada or EU,) GDP PER CAPITA that instead of conferring an advantage, (which it ''does'' do in absolute dollar terms,) it leads to a reverse flow.
The wealthy get poorer instead or the poor getting richer.
I find it amusing that our politicians, who are so concerned with competing on ''a level playng field,'' are more interested in squeezing the money to be made from the difference between the poor and the rich.
They have the biggest market by far; and going on the tenets of Capitalism, as espoused by George Bush AND John Kerry, means that WE will have to adapt to THEM, not the other way around.
Unfortunately M$ has already screwed itself into increasing marginalization by its rapacious business practices. They are f*cked.
There's no way that China's business and end-user communities are going to shell out the kinds of money for Windows when Linux is free and government supported.
In the end, Linux will be damn near free and multi-lingual, and Chinese will be a major deal, or it too will go the way of CPM.
I've always considered M$ to be an abberration. As we expand globally, despite the pains it is causing us, here at the top, M$ will dissapear because the rest of the world CAN'T AFFORD IT.
M$ rode in on "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", back when IBM was selling to the extremely wealthy, and grew to their present status, legally and otherwise, when that changed to "Nobody ever got fired for saving the company's paper budget." (PCs were originally bought from companies' paper budgets!)
Mow they have to face the fact that they are victims of the very technological changes they wrought.
Hmm. This article is not entirely dealing in fact.
on
Does Microsoft Need China?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Thinking of M$ as "an admired giant seeking to find a footing in the developing world" is specious.
M$ is reviled here, that's for shure. And its insistence on adherence on illegal marketing practices, and f*ck the anti-trust, is the main cause, followed closely by its buggy, security flawed software is the reasin why.
Furthermore the thought that the computing market is anywhere near a "mature market" is just plain wrong.
We haven't begun to see the innovations in UI and processing capacity that will suggest themselves when our machines are no longer deaf, dumb and blind.
This was a "rah-rah" article, but it was very short sighted.
The CompSci equivalent of the Hottentot and Piraha counting sistem is even weirder.
Nany (None) is not a number, like Zero, but an instantiation whereby a Class (an ObjectFactory) spits out an instance.
Any (one) is not a number, but an instance that encapsulate values, that can do things and can destroy itself.
Many (many) is one of several collection and relationship mechanisms. All you can fundanentally do with a collection is extract or identify a collected object. Connections, instances of Relationships, are existential and may also have values associated with them.
The Piraha have a handicap in that they have the concept of two and no concept of zero.
The Spammers will keep on doing this as long as there's a buck to be made. They'll stop when you dry up the well.
Their market is all the 'drug'stores and wet-dream merchants who want to use this technology to shill their crap.
Fine them BIG time, leaving the collection of the fines to the local authorities, and I can garantee you that Spam will become just sh*t in a can again.
Don't worry about the corruption of the authorities somewhere (off-shore havens for porno crap and drug 'factories',) because, the more corrupt they are, the more its is in their personal interest to execute the prosecution of the law.
We get Spam, we go to court, we get a summary judgement, and let the local authorities collect.
In some jurisdictions, Spammers' CUSTOMERS will need armed escorts to the out-house.
Quite apart from the quality of the images. 3.2MPxl is a minimum.
Okay the web can get away with 640x480 or less, but for prints? C'mon...
There is also the issues of privacy when the pictures are of any, uh, salacious nature. How do you know your pictures won't end up where you don't intend?
People got into digital photography and web pron got a lot better. But they knew what they were doing, with signed releases and everything.:-)
What advantage would having an eye in the sky, even for just a few minutes, specially one that's small and hard to shoot down, give our troops fighting in Iraq?
You advance, launch a pile of there suckers, with a homing signal for easy retrieval, and a small explosive charge for those that find something nasty which means you don't want 'em back. And advance again without anybody being able to play hide-n-seek with guns.
Air mail delivery of small, as snmart as the operator, mosque preserving, bomblets.
Or if they were deployed in an urban gorilla theatre, you'd have something that you could send indoors on recon with a very small GPS homing beacon and BOOM!
Now Moqtada al-Sadr would have a read problem on his hands, and some depleted uranium bullets up his ass, without even able to see us, never mind try to shoot at us.
Apart from very few of the northern states, nobody, and I mean nobody, has access to as much fresh water.
Most people haven't got a clue how big it (the country, never mind the lake) is.
They're idea of huge is actually pretty small. Lake Mead sized. They're not used to thinking of lakes that curve over the horizon (13km or so) before catching sight of the other shore. Most people can't imagine how big 393 cubic MILES of water is.
Now if you really want to awe them, tell these same people that the province of Ontario also borders lake Huron and lake Superior. which bring the size of the heat-sink to multiples of the capacity of lake Ontario.
Then tell them that the north of the province (never mind Quebec or Manitoba,) is dotted with near-countless lakes holding nearly the same quantity of water.
Then watch out. American industry is THIRSTY!
The hubs of industry in the coming century and China (HUGE markets served by the Three Gorges project dams) and Quebec (HUGE energy consuming market t the south served by the La Grande dams)
Slashdot Mirror
M$ Windows is an INDENSPENSIBLE product on PCs. M$ worked on making it that for years. (Don't get me started on how.)
...)
They can relocate their headquarters and 'production' facilities ANYWHERE on this planet that gives them an advantage.
Just wait 'til Gates find out how beautiful life can be on a small island (Pitcairn's maybe) and then we can all be fucked paying thge M$ tax while they pay NONE of their own.
Its because of the hegemonic impedence mismatch between the a geographically bounded nation state and the boundaryless multi-national.
If the 'country' that a multi-national finds itself in does anything to cost it anything, it can MOVE. And the multi-national can do so with astonishing ease.
They're now arguing whether China is being humane in shooting copyright violators, not the shooting but whether using bullets is humane. Killing people for ripping copies of "The Captain and Tenille" or some other ephemera.
Multi-nationals should be out-lawed (not likely to happen, they can buy the whores in Washington, or Ottawa, or Mexico City, or Moskva or
OR they should be met by a uniform code of international laws which erases the relative advantages (same comment as above,)
OR we, the citizens, should be given universality of hegemony (regardless of where you live on the planet, you can choose who's national rules you live by. [If you own shares in, or work for a company that opted to establish somewhere with no taxes, but as a consequence has no health care at all, YOU don't have health care at all.])
Or what Browser. Or what mail program. Or which ports I had open on my router.
I think I'm secure with Mac OSs and Linux & Mozilla & Mac's Mail.
I know every snoop program that tries to load itself as an attachment. There's a load of shit out there, but they don't get automatically run because I'm smart and I don't run anysoftware I don't have the source code for (except for Aqua.)
"This is America and we work under the Capitalist system. If something isn't profitable it is either done away with completely or bought up by the government. Comcast wouldn't be buying up every cable company in the country to spread their influences if it wasn't profitable."
The Capitalist system is NOT the free market system. It consists of getting the MOST money for your investment.
When there is competition, prices don't necessarily drop either. It doesn't have to be collusion or price fixing either but just an assumption that the price currently charged is what can be borne by the buyers.
The profits may have been small when the infrastructure was being created but become larger and larger as time passes as the infrastructure becomes wide-spread and comoditized.
Almost everything wired will become wireless as the infrastructure becomes wide-spread. Its more convenient NOT to run miles and miles of wires when you can use "nothing" to carry the signal. ("Nothing" is FREE! It costs zero capital expenditure.)
This is the last stage when M$ realizes that their ROI FUD isn't working.
They're claiming that people are buying Linux machines, to save money, and then turfing Linux in favour of an unsupported, bootleg copy of Windows.
Yeah. Right. Brilliant. Anybody bright enough to replace an operating system (at best daunting task,) is bright enough not to try it.
I have a LinkSys LAN at home with a Linux box, a couple of OS X Macs and a Windows box. I keep the Windows box turned OFF.
Then I don't have to worry about it getting viruses, worms, trojean horses and other forms of pestilence.
You realise Rutan's just GOT to design a plane for the Martian athmosphere.
The gravityis so much less there, he can really have fun.
All you need is a point anywhere along the network to receive all of the packets on that network.
If its not your IP address, you're supposed to ignore 'em. They want to bug the phones, they don't ignore 'em. Its called sniffing.
But you do bring up the point that M$'s marketing, when unaided by antitrust strong-arm tactics to your own vendors, has spawned the most pathetically lame selling strategies and products.
With Linux, the price point is $0.00. It can't get cheaper than that. And there's no wiggle room. You can't vie for a reduced share of a market that has no financial value.
Give up Bill. You can't fight free. (That would make him into one of Olly North's freedom fighters. That would make him dead.)
You can make your money by hanging onto a diminishing market-share but there are no new opportunities for you.
Steve Jobs figured that the best computer was invisible (look at the iMac G5, look at the iPod) while being very visible as it own thing.
Think of everything they've done to push the envellope. Everything used to be sexy hardware. And damn good hardware at that. (SCSI, USB, FireWire, WiFi, BlueTooth, MC680x0->PPC601 without a hitch.) But they also made damn good software too. (OS 1..6, 7..9 & OS X)
There has always been a synergy between hardware and software. But I think that this will become more pervasive while being less distinguishable.
Look for Apple to start doing things with the larger Studio Displays to eliminate the computer.
Wall mountable intelligence, complete with BlueTooth and WiFi while 'disappearing' the CPU. Its the death of the 'box' in 'home' situations. (It won't disappear from the product grid because that's where non-home apps live.)
Your 'wired home' will have peripherals scatered through out the house, and RendezVous will keep track of them all.
I want my flying car, damn it. I was promised a "nucular" flying car.
Popular mechanics had pictures and everything.
The best place to pur it is Equador. Athur C. Clarke would disagree but ... Equador is called that because it is right on the equator.
The terrorists would have a field day trying to blow it up, which is why you have to have many and varied international agreements.
WTF is Apple (named after Newton's proverbial falling apple,) supposed to cell itself?
If I was Apple Computer Corporation, I'd sue Apple Corp for trademark infringement. Newton predates John Lennon by a long shot.
I'm picking nits but, really.
Its not even my first language and I know how to write English better than that.
Google finds me "Results 1 - 10 of about 145,000 for "The Immortal" movie." and all of these are wrong.
The Immortal isn't enough to go on. Got a better search strategy?
The redistribution of wealth comes at a premium from base.
If the base is high, say between the US and Canada (not Mexico yet,) or across most of the EU the changes mean that "A rising tide lifts all boats." Economies progress to a higher level by building on what came before.
If the base is low, say between India and the US, the flow is the same, (economics as thermodynamics) but the changes means that you get burnt by the __rate__ of the transfer.
In effect, you have a redistribution of poverty, not one of wealth.
The current immigration policies of the US (and Canada and the EU for that matter,) albeit prejudicial, flawed and exclusionary means that the __rate__ of the transfer is occuring at a tolerable pace.
The current phenomenon of __foreign__ out-sourcing (out-sourcing ''per se'' is not is a major problem since the expense base is directly comparable and commensurate,) is the cause of all the arguments.
The comparative advantage of some labour costs is __too__ great because you're comparing Apple to oranges.
The annual GDP PER CAPITA of Malaisia or India is so much lower than the US (or Caqnada or EU,) GDP PER CAPITA that instead of conferring an advantage, (which it ''does'' do in absolute dollar terms,) it leads to a reverse flow.
The wealthy get poorer instead or the poor getting richer.
I find it amusing that our politicians, who are so concerned with competing on ''a level playng field,'' are more interested in squeezing the money to be made from the difference between the poor and the rich.
They have the biggest market by far; and going on the tenets of Capitalism, as espoused by George Bush AND John Kerry, means that WE will have to adapt to THEM, not the other way around.
Unfortunately M$ has already screwed itself into increasing marginalization by its rapacious business practices. They are f*cked.
There's no way that China's business and end-user communities are going to shell out the kinds of money for Windows when Linux is free and government supported.
In the end, Linux will be damn near free and multi-lingual, and Chinese will be a major deal, or it too will go the way of CPM.
I've always considered M$ to be an abberration. As we expand globally, despite the pains it is causing us, here at the top, M$ will dissapear because the rest of the world CAN'T AFFORD IT.
M$ rode in on "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", back when IBM was selling to the extremely wealthy, and grew to their present status, legally and otherwise, when that changed to "Nobody ever got fired for saving the company's paper budget." (PCs were originally bought from companies' paper budgets!)
Mow they have to face the fact that they are victims of the very technological changes they wrought.
Thinking of M$ as "an admired giant seeking to find a footing in the developing world" is specious.
M$ is reviled here, that's for shure. And its insistence on adherence on illegal marketing practices, and f*ck the anti-trust, is the main cause, followed closely by its buggy, security flawed software is the reasin why.
Furthermore the thought that the computing market is anywhere near a "mature market" is just plain wrong.
We haven't begun to see the innovations in UI and processing capacity that will suggest themselves when our machines are no longer deaf, dumb and blind.
This was a "rah-rah" article, but it was very short sighted.
We'll see how my wife likes it...
What happened to the other 2 hours?
I never trusted anybody who doesn't have a real job.
The CompSci equivalent of the Hottentot and Piraha counting sistem is even weirder.
Nany (None) is not a number, like Zero, but an instantiation whereby a Class (an ObjectFactory) spits out an instance.
Any (one) is not a number, but an instance that encapsulate values, that can do things and can destroy itself.
Many (many) is one of several collection and relationship mechanisms. All you can fundanentally do with a collection is extract or identify a collected object. Connections, instances of Relationships, are existential and may also have values associated with them.
The Piraha have a handicap in that they have the concept of two and no concept of zero.
The Spammers will keep on doing this as long as there's a buck to be made. They'll stop when you dry up the well.
Their market is all the 'drug'stores and wet-dream merchants who want to use this technology to shill their crap.
Fine them BIG time, leaving the collection of the fines to the local authorities, and I can garantee you that Spam will become just sh*t in a can again.
Don't worry about the corruption of the authorities somewhere (off-shore havens for porno crap and drug 'factories',) because, the more corrupt they are, the more its is in their personal interest to execute the prosecution of the law.
We get Spam, we go to court, we get a summary judgement, and let the local authorities collect.
In some jurisdictions, Spammers' CUSTOMERS will need armed escorts to the out-house.
Say "Bye bye" to Spam for good.
Quite apart from the quality of the images. 3.2MPxl is a minimum.
:-)
Okay the web can get away with 640x480 or less, but for prints? C'mon...
There is also the issues of privacy when the pictures are of any, uh, salacious nature. How do you know your pictures won't end up where you don't intend?
People got into digital photography and web pron got a lot better. But they knew what they were doing, with signed releases and everything.
I mean its hard enough, isn't it?
All those pointers and 0 based arithmetic. I swear if I ever have to write another link-list routine, I'll go postal.
What advantage would having an eye in the sky, even for just a few minutes, specially one that's small and hard to shoot down, give our troops fighting in Iraq?
You advance, launch a pile of there suckers, with a homing signal for easy retrieval, and a small explosive charge for those that find something nasty which means you don't want 'em back. And advance again without anybody being able to play hide-n-seek with guns.
Air mail delivery of small, as snmart as the operator, mosque preserving, bomblets.
Or if they were deployed in an urban gorilla theatre, you'd have something that you could send indoors on recon with a very small GPS homing beacon and BOOM!
Now Moqtada al-Sadr would have a read problem on his hands, and some depleted uranium bullets up his ass, without even able to see us, never mind try to shoot at us.
the US's (heck, the rest of the world's.)
Apart from very few of the northern states, nobody, and I mean nobody, has access to as much fresh water.
Most people haven't got a clue how big it (the country, never mind the lake) is.
They're idea of huge is actually pretty small. Lake Mead sized. They're not used to thinking of lakes that curve over the horizon (13km or so) before catching sight of the other shore. Most people can't imagine how big 393 cubic MILES of water is.
Now if you really want to awe them, tell these same people that the province of Ontario also borders lake Huron and lake Superior. which bring the size of the heat-sink to multiples of the capacity of lake Ontario.
Then tell them that the north of the province (never mind Quebec or Manitoba,) is dotted with near-countless lakes holding nearly the same quantity of water.
Then watch out. American industry is THIRSTY!
The hubs of industry in the coming century and China (HUGE markets served by the Three Gorges project dams) and Quebec (HUGE energy consuming market t the south served by the La Grande dams)