Really good comment, probably the best informed one I've seen on slashdot in ages:). You're dead-on correct about repackaged drugs extending patent life.
However, talking about M&A activity your argument breaks down a bit. The pharma ecology consists of a number of different players.
Big Pharma: These guys get the most attention. They have deep pockets, big sales and marketing organizations, strong distribution and manufacturing channels. They need to sell big blockbuster drugs (drugs that have huge markets like Lipitor) to justify their stock price.
Midsized Pharma: These companies are like mini versions of the big guys. They aren't as big, but do NOT need big markets to survive. They just need some good, moderate successes in niche markets.
Startups: These companies specialize in research. They outsource whatever they can, and have no manufacturing, sales or marketing. Mostly, they do research and hope to get bought out.
Academia: Big colleges and universities. They are good at research but have no ability at manufacturing, sales or marketing. They're notoriously bad at estimating the value of what they have. Many professors simply found their own startups when they think they might have something.
OK so everybody does research, but startups and academia are better at it than the big pharmas. Basically, you want a situation where the big pharmas are selling the blockbusters like Viagra or Lipitor because they can handle the capacity. You want midsized pharmas to be selling everything else because they aren't chained to the expectation that every drug needs to be a mega-hit.
So typically you see new molecules being packaged and sold to startups to explore. There are small startups that buy drug concepts from big pharmas, then run them through the approvals process. Midsized companies both buy AND sell their drug proposals. Academia has no ability to get stuff approved, so they just sell their compounds or spin them off. Big pharma used to shelve drugs that they didn't think would be big winners, but now they simply sell them to other companies that can exploit them. Everyone wins.
Once the drug is nearly approved, big and midsized pharma buys them. They pay a heavy premium, which recoups the investor's time and the risk that the drug wouldn't be approved at all. Usually, since a startup has one or two drugs in its portfolio, the pharma doesn't dick around-- they just buy the whole company. Eventually the officers leave and found new startups.
Sometimes a big pharma has a "gap" in its pipeline-- they're big moneymakers are going out of patent while the drugs they thought would be about to be released fail their clinical trial. In that situation, if they have the money they'll buy another pharma to pick up its drugs, or, if they lack cash, they get snapped up by a pharma looking to expand. Hence all the mergers and acquisitions.
Research flows downhill to smaller companies, products bubble up to the pharmas. Products that are marginal improvements, like extended release versions, are a problem but if they really weren't that much better then managed care companies and doctors would stick with the now-generic version of the original drug.
Why do drugs take so long to develop? Answer: it takes 8-10 years to get them through clinical trials. It's illegal to sell a drug without doing that, but even if you did you'd end up with flipper babies eventually. Making sure something is safe is expensive and time consuming.
Why do drugs cost so much? Answer: it costs $800 million dollars to develop a new drug. That drug can sell for 5 years or so before going out of patent.
Why do pharmas make such big profits? Answer: risk premium and time value of money. These hotshot biotech startups go bankrupt all the time. The ones that make it have to return enough to make investing in them in the first place worth it.
Why do I think that the big pharmas will do pretty well? Because they're buying
Cystic Fibrosis used to be basically a death sentence by age 25. Now people with it are living into their 40's. Heart attacks are being reduced by the use of statin drugs. AIDS, once a killer, is controllable by drugs to the point where you often don't have any symptoms at all. This is true for all kinds of diseases. World death rate still 100%? Sure, but that doesn't mean progress isn't being made. We're living longer, and our quality of life is up.
If Intel were in the business of modifying CPU's they'd dug out of a closet and didn't have the schematics for, then he'd be in a position to complain. The body is an insanely complicated collection of interdependant systems-- each CELL is more complex than one of his chips, and we have trillions of cells in our bodies of innumerable different types.
Not even counting the basic research to get a drug compound in the first place, it costs 8-10 years and $800 billion dollars to develop ONE new drug. A drug that is profitable for 5 years or so before going generic due to patent law. 75 of the top 100 drugs will be going generic by 2010.
Finally, with the advent of biologics, we're getting a stream of new drugs with fewer side effects that are even more effective. The human genome was done about ten years ago, right? Well it takes a year or two to start developing compounds based on a discovery, then it takes about 8-10 years to get a drug approved by the FDA. Every time you read about a bio discovery in the newspaper, add about 12-15 years and that's the date you'll see people start getting treated.
As to what he's saying about big pharma not producing new drugs, he's totally ignoring where most of the basic research takes place: small biotech startups. Big pharma sells their drug candidates to these little companies to shepherd through approval, then buys companies about to make it big. Medium pharmas buy companies with drugs with smaller markets. What Grove said is like us saying "the computer industry sucks because Intel hasn't put out much new software".
If pharma's weren't making real discoveries, then there'd be no difference between new drugs and generics and we'd be buying all our drugs for $4 at Wal Mart. Doctors have no obligation to prescribe expensive drugs-- mine gives me generics all the time. Pharmas are under incredible pressure to get new drugs on the market, and their stock prices are determined in large part by the value of this pipeline.
I notice that Google is looking for CS degrees. In most industries, PDM is considered to be a marketing discipline. You can get a whole curriculum in product management-- in fact, some MS and PhD programs in business are focused on just that. But many companies in electronics and computer science still insist on hiring computer science majors with no experience in product management, hoping they'll just figure it out. There's a whole galaxy of people out there with multiple years of PDM experience, no formal training and whose process is basically to try to solve product vision questions using intuition alone.
Product management is more than just a bunch of judgement calls and guesstimates. It's a quantitative field of its own. Go look at product management in other fields if you don't believe that. In a novel product category (where you usually find Google products), things do get much hairier. Creativity is important, too, and young people tend to be more creative. Google should be applauded for giving these guys 2 years of training. And they're clearly looking for the "internal entrepreneur" type, which is hard to cultivate in a person. As I'm reading the article, it looks like APMs are responsible for managing people as well as products, making training even more important.
Google should be applauded for giving these guys 2 years of training. You can get your MBA in two years if you hurry-- a MS in a specialized business field like PDM can take a year or less. Google is producing people with advanced business educations without the written degree (much like IBM used to poach people who were a semester or two short of a grad school degree). As entrepreneurial types, the lack of a diploma may not even bother them.
I'd say that as a business move and a people-building move, this is an excellent idea.
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You can't have everything. Saving every possible article just on the off chance that it might someday BECOME notable isn't really helping anyone. If it becomes notable then just re-add the article-- your sources are there, right? You cited your sources, didn't you? If you can get an admin's help, you can even get the article undeleted. Your talk of the UN Data Purge points out that, unless there's some global conspiracy, this stuff will STILL be around.
Of course, Notability, Citations and NPOV are both critical to Wikipedia doing its job, and the sources of the more pernicious abuse by admins and heavy users. Once you know how the game is played, you can use these three policies (and bio: living persons) as an ideological battering ram to put your bias into any article you want.
I've seen very notable articles be nearly deleted by admins who (if you look at their histories) are just shooting down targets they don't agree with. Mergers and splits can be abused similarly: use a merger to delete parts you don't like. Use sub-articles to hide them where they won't see the light of day. Or do both-- divide out an article, then a few months later delete or re-merge it. Flag something as against NPOV, then GIVE it a point of view. Use citations from biased sources like lobbyist groups to justify your points, then delete other viewpoints because no source is cited. Call up an article on notability-- it often won't have people regularly watching it and you can delete it before someone realizes you proposed deletion. The best part is that many of these abuses occur from admins and contributors who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing. It's not that they're evil, it's that they're human and subject to bias like everyone else. Hell, I've sometimes caught myself pushing a POV with a persnickety policy complaint-- I hope I've never hit Save, but I can't say for sure.
Overall, I love wikipedia. I'm a regular contributor, and I believe in the value of the project. I also believe in the policies I mentioned above-- used correctly they make wikipedia something that's really useful. I'm sorry to the webcomic authors who feel abused by the system. Like I said, admins often do abuse the system, knowingly or not. Still, the system overall works and if your comic is really notable then it can survive a deletion proposal.
BTW someday I do want to write an article on how to abuse Wikipedia to advance a personal agenda. Not so people can do it, but so wikipedians can be aware of their own biases and how the system can be exploited.
Drug resistant TB is found in the US-- in an urban area where conditions are right (lots of uninsured people not getting treated, close proximity for easy transmission etc) it could flare up any time. By the time you know you have an epidemic, it's often way too late to act. And the FDA, with the most stringent guidelines, is the best proxy for other nations' regulatory boards. If the FDA has approved it, it's rare that anyone else won't.
Incidentally, doctors won't start using it immediately for that as far as FDA is concerned. A pharmaceutical will have to file for a new indication for an existing drug. This is a long expensive process. FDA is responsible for ensuring that a drug is safe and effective. We only know that it's safe so far, not effective for this indication (that requires a controlled, pre-approved Phase III doubleblind study monitored by the FDA). Many pharmas don't like studying new uses for existing drugs that are out of patent because they won't usually be able to recoup their research costs on a drug that has already gone generic.
Doctors can IIRC prescribe for the new indication anyway; but insurance coverage and pharmas being able to document the new indication has to wait for the FDA say-so.
That's the price of fame. Winners get sniped at all the time. The smart kid gets picked on. The rich, successful, high-GPA athlete at the elite university gets turned into a Duke Lacrosse player. The super-rich, powerful and/or famous get hounded by reporters and paparazzi to report their slightest missteps and humiliations. That's human nature.
Lobbyist groups like Greenpeace are made up of people who, while mostly they genuinely believe in their cause, are normal people who have careers and lives to think about. They want to build the organization so they can have people reporting to them in their department, a higher salary, and prestige in their field. They want to feel powerful. So of course they'll do unfair but publicity-grabbing showboats. It even serves their cause. More attention to Greenpeace drives funding, personnel and other organizational improvements that help them pursue their cause. More power = more attention from the press, having credibility with powerful political and business leaders, and more public awareness.
This isn't unique to Greenpeace. A great many organizations are Outrage Machines. They're the ones that decry Harry Potter, Teletubbies, the Republicans, gun companies, KFC, the Democrats, Domino's Pizza, Coors Beer, Warren Buffet, etc etc. What bothers people I think isn't the hypocrisy-- it's when Greenpeace actually comes out and admits to it. But it's behind all kinds of causes, including many that you and I believe very strongly in.
Is it ethical? Well, that's a good question. I don't have a good answer to that one, or rules that would apply more than situationally. Most lobbyists are either True Believers or very very cynical-- and I'm not sure which is worse.
I'm going to laugh myself unconscious when the United States Military solves the problem of clean, renewable energy for the world. Take that, hippies! Muahahahahaaaaa! And with a vast enough array of collectors blocking the sunlight, they could also solve global warming. For the record, Monty Burns has already tried this. "Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing...block it out!"
Incidentally, not only is it a good idea from a logistics perspective, but you can also weaponize the transmitter. Finally, since you're collecting all that power anyway, why not beam some to construction efforts. You could ship the materials into orbit using that orbital gun that Gerald Bull was trying to build in Iraq. Ready supply of materials and energy could help us get a real foothold in orbit.
Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such informational films as "Let's Get Ready for the Iridium Standard" and "Tritium: Delicious But Deadly!"
I'm still trying to understand what exactly the problem is.
The Slate article seems to imply that widespread broadband isn't happening. But it is-- coverage is growing at a nice clip and while we do have the problem of only at best two major players in each market (telephone and cable providers) this is a young industry and that's to be expected. I'm trying to understand exactly what the Slate guy is asking for from a customer experience perspective. From the article:
To recover costs, the private "partner" has to charge for service. But if the customer already has a cable or telephone connection to his home, why switch to wireless unless it is dramatically cheaper or better? In typical configurations, municipal wireless connections are slower, not dramatically cheaper, and by their nature less reliable than existing Internet services. Those facts have put muni Wi-Fi in the same deathtrap that drowned every other company that peddled a new Net access scheme.
OK so what's the problem here? If customers are getting something faster, cheaper and more reliable, why does slapping a "local government" label on it make any difference? This seems to all be borne of "Government should compete with the phone company". Is that realistic, desirable or sane? I guess we could create a US Department of Lunch like the illuminati card and then bemoan our lack of municipal hamburger infrastructure because the public solution can't deliver fries like the private sector.
There is one area where municipal Wi-Fi actually isn't such a dumb idea, though. Municipalities which create robust, wide-area networks to consolidate their emergency service and public works WWANs, plus add access for city departments that typically don't get field-accessible internet. There are some real cost savings to be had doing that, mostly since these departments have redundant, mutually incompatible systems already. You get interoperability and the ability to crisis-manage for free (something the 9/11 commission argued for). In that case, you're doing something that makes sense anyway, but once your coverage footprint is in place, you can try selling or giving away the vast amounts of unused bandwidth-- usually with a proviso that you can shut them down temporarily during a public emergency to give your own services priority.
We really don't want to make the same mistake Europe did with landline phones. The US left it to the private sector (that is, the Bell system) and the Europeans tried to nationalize it, for all the great reasons the Gweihir gives. The Europeans ended up with an expensive, unreliable, tangled mess. The only good that came our of their crappy phone system was that it was so terrible that it drove Europeans to adopt wireless phones long before americans saw the need. (Of course they're so geographically concentrated that it was also just plain cheaper to set up.)
The reason "nerds" like the Libertarian party is that they tend to prefer simplistic models to reality. Black and white thinking creates all-or-nothing ideologies.
LOL.
Technologists deal with complexity every day. Most of the liberals I know are humanities majors or lawyers whose interests are mostly in simple linear thinking. That is, they haven't really been taught to think strategically, or at least in their daily working lives aren't called on to plan and implement and work on complex systems. When someone on the left wing sees an economic problem (say, too many Americans without health insurance, and cripplingly high prices for healthcare), their immediate reaction is "well we'll just GIVE everyone healthcare". As new issues and objections emerge, they weave ever-more-complicated webs of regulation around their original, fairly simplistic plan.
Now you'd think that my fellow right-wingers, who recognize why this just isn't going to work in the economic realm, would realize why in cultural issues this won't work either. But of course they usually don't. Given a complex problem like drugs or the changing face of the family, the knee-jerk reaction there is again to use a gross, overt use of power to force the world to conform to their ideals. The liberals laugh, but their economic views are just as silly, and for largely the same reasons.
Any programmer, engineer, or doctor (all fairly nerdy professions) knows that if you start making major changes to a complex system, you're not likely to get anything resembling the solution you want. Because those professions deal with complexity, and since it stems from natural laws rather than social systems you can't just bluff or persuade your way out of it the way social sciences or humanities types can. So while you'll find any stream of thought in any profession, I'm not surprised that technology types are more likely to be libertarian.
It's not that Libertarians prefer simplistic solutions. It's that they prefer subtle, indirect solutions that are more respectful of the complexity and unpredictability of a society. A decade of famine in North Korea due to their socialist paradise has stunted an entire generation's growth, so Kim Jong Il put up signs in high schools that say "Grow". For all the pounds of paperwork and huge bureaucracies and tens of thousands of exceptions, clauses and loopholes, most big government solutions have the underlying sophistication of those posters.
Those are good examples, and you make a great point at low and mid-levels, but when you get to high level play you can easily add 10 minutes per day of Spider Climb to your boots for 7,200gp. At that point, costs like that are a rounding error. Or better yet, buy an item that gives you flight-- not only do you never need to worry about jump or climb again (except in antimagic fields), but you also can bypass content and travel more swiftly. You no longer need a mount or other transport other than as a tactical choice (eg mounted combat). You have a potent kiting mechanism against many ground-only monsters.
Sure there are situational cases where Climb or Jump are still useful; but those are so rare that at high level play you're likely to jump less often than you are to use Use Rope. RP purists can still buy those skills (along with Profession: Basketweaver) but D&D is designed around combat, so you're shooting yourself in the foot if you do. Ideally, D&D shouldn't punish you for good RP; games like World of Darkness actually reward it. Ideally since skills cost the same they should be similar in overall utility; you'll never be perfectly balanced but it's like setting a level for a spell: if it's a spell you couldn't imagine NOT getting it then it's too powerful and if you can't imagine ever blowing a valuable spell slot or action casting it then it's not powerful enough.
Some people think that roleplaying and gaming are mutually incompatible-- or at least compete with one another. At times, that's true, but it needn't be so. We power-game in real life. My friend who had a high Int dumped all his skill points into "Knowledge: Computer Programming" to maximize his weekly skill check to earn the maximum number of gold pieces. Another friend, who has a high Cha score, splurged on masterwork clothing (+2 to diplomacy checks) and constantly socializes (checks Diplomacy) to maximize people's attitude towards him. These friends give him business connections (Aid Another on his weekly profession check), let him in on the latest gossip (aid another on his already-good Gather Information score) and do him favors (since they are Helpful towards him). He also has had a string of great girlfriends, which I can't put into D&D terms because I don't know the system for seduction, but you get the point.
Is that min-maxing? Sure! And it's definitely true to life because it is real life.:)
I'm chuckling at people who think any change to simplify the system is a change for the worse. The Hackmaster crowd can always play Shadowrun if they want an evershifting catalog of contradictory rules and exceptions.
Obviously, the proof is in the pudding, but for now what I'm hearing about D&D 4.0 is very positive. There are lots of rules like grappling that bear no relation to the other game rules and which grind the game to a halt when you try to use them. There are skills like Use Rope which are clearly inferior to other uses of your skill points, like Spot or Use Magic Device. Other skills and abilities quickly become obsolete: e.g. Climb, Heal and Jump (both are replaced by spells). Gear, especially flat +stats items, has become the end-all and be-all of advancement. And the endless prep work and bookkeeping, especially for the GM, is a waste of time and detracts from the fun of the game.
Plus, a game needs a reboot from time to time. AD&D became bloated with endless supplements, kits and spells that eventually made play completely impenetrable. 3.5 is heading in the same direction. YOu can't stop that, but you can occassionally reboot, reproducing and refining the stuff that works and dumping or rewriting the stuff that doesn't.
None of this is specific to newbies, either. Hard-core players would love to have a simplier but still thematically and tactically rich game, because then you can have five fights a night instead of three. Or your GM can afford to make the same three fights much more interesting, unique and challenging. Or you can free up some time for, G-d forbid, actually RP your character.
There are tons of games out there with clunky rules if you want difficulty and tedium for its own sake. I'm cheering for D&D because while I love 3.5, I can see the game becoming much more fun.
First, there's physical proximity. It's an excuse to sit down with a bunch of friends, pop open a beer and enjoy yourself. You can't quite match that in a MMORPG, even with Teamspeak.
Second, there's creativity. My experience in MMORPGs is that there's endless grinding of trash mobs, highly scripted raid encounters that you fight every week the same way, and PVP battles that are exciting but still pretty much scripted. A good DM designs all kinds of weird and interesting encounters, including conversational RP encounters.
Finally, there's the "greatest hero ever" effect. In a MMORPG, you can't ALL be the great hero of the world. Ultimately, everyone has to be roughly balanced with one another. Even the top-end raiders and PVPers on the server, while great and well geared, aren't going to change the game world any. And everyone else doesn't even have a name for themselves. In a pen-and-paper setting you and your friends really can do world-shaking events. You can down Illidan and he STAYS DEAD. (mostly)
OK so let me wrap it all together. In my weekly D&D game, I get together with friends who live up to an hour away in every direction. We meet up, grab some drinks, talk about how things are going face to face, and then get down to the game. One of us is a ruthless mercenary ranger, another is a minotaur who just completed his plot to be crowned Emperor of the Minotaur Empire, another is a warlock who is finally realizing his goal of revenge against the red dragons, and another is a mystic who attained godhood. We've been playing for five years, from level one to our current (epic) game. We now run two side games in the same world-- one game we play our own lowbie minions, and the other we are actually starting to play mid-level antagonists. When we do world-shaking things, the world actually shakes and stays shaken. Our actions have permanent consequences, our enemies and allies react to us (and try to pre-empt us), and we have to consider the economic, political, social and religious consequences of our actions.
None of this is possible, even remotely, in a MMORPG. I love WoW, I play avidly. I've got a 70 and am working on two more. I PvP avidly, and am in an end-game raiding guild. To some extent, WoW and D&D do scratch the same itch, but neither is a good substitute for the other.
Gaming is cyclical. Alot of the reason that D&D 3.0 did so well was that people hadn't played D&D in a while.
The D&D-style fantasy settings have dominated for several years now. And d20 drives a certain vision of playstyle and progression that also has a deadly sameness if it's the only system you use. So while I love D&D 3.5, I do hunger for something different and would love to see something new pop up. Not to replace D&D, just to bring something fresh in.
The time is ripe for a new fad in gaming, be it World of Darkness or some other venerable setting. My concern above is that White Wolf doesn't have the pocketbook or the people to take advantage of the opportunity.
Most of the talent that was at White Wolf for their big successes is long gone. I'm a big fan of the WoD, but we have to be honest about their ability to create new content. Certainly, WoTC brought D&D back from boredom-- but they did it with a top-notch development team. White Wolf could be well-positioned as an alternative to D&D now that they're so dominant again if they get the talent.
Honestly, this might be a cheaper way for CCP to be buying the gaming rights to the WoD. The assets are worth more than the organization in this case.
Yeah best of breed is often not the best solution given integration costs... but I think that that has more to do with the way purchasing processes work. Going single source has up-front, obvious tradeoffs. Best of breed you get exactly what you want, and if you've been investing months into the purchase process you feel like you're getting more for your work by cobbling a solution together. And in some cases, you do.
I think this is a lesson to people who would participate in fanac: do not cooperate with a studio or publisher's viral marketing programs. Instead, if you are going to participate at all, you need to avoid any contact or interaction with the studio, and behave as if they were hostile to fan promotion and viral marketing from the get-go. The lesson is that just because Universal was actively encouraging it before, doesn't mean that they can't or won't go after you later. Notice that they didn't try to communicate with the fan base, they encouraged fan promotion, then issued the C&D letters.
IANAL, but even if the fan sites are 100% in the clear legally, the costs of defending yourself against legal action will be enormous. This is what they count on: the ability to intimidate through the sheer cost and time of a lawsuit. It's why the trial lawyers spend huge amounts of money blocking tort reform. They win even if they lose, because their lawyers are salaried and you can't afford to fight them.
And according to the article, Universal isn't just going after 11th Hour for trademarks that they own. They're trying to claim ownership of the word "serenity" itself, and the chinese character for the word. In other words, even fan material that doesn't overtly use a trademark or copyright is vulnerable to a crippling lawsuit.
My feeling is that if it takes trained experts and tons of complex equipment to determine where the stone came from, then who cares. A diamond's purpose is to look pretty, and these aren't fake or imitation, they are real friggin diamonds. People want to pay hundreds of times as much for the point of origin, which amounts to a brand name.
Personally, I like sapphires more anyway, and with the Russian Hydrothermal sapphires being as good as they are, I get a great lab-created equivalent there too.
Hrmm, then what's my choice?
Naturally occuring diamonds, which are far more expensive, sometimes used for money laudering, and are farmed by people working in appalling working conditions.
Lab-created diamonds, which are cheaper, physically identical, and are made by engineers (who I like more anyway)
Exactly! Many of apple's "software" value is actually in hardware. The comparative stability of their platform, their control over the overall user experience, all stems from their control of their hardware platform.
Also, from a business strategy perspective, Dell's company may be pursuing operational excellence, but Apple's value discipline is product leadership. If Apple tried to compete on cost, it would lose-- economies of scale alone would be against it, plus much more. Apple's value is that they have in the customer's eye a far superior product, one that people are willing to pay a premium on. You think that Apple could keep its already-slim market share if they became a commodity? Of course not, apple's strength has always been that they play their own game in their own little protected part of the market.
The accounting value of improving or preserving margins is far outweighed by the strategic value of their product differentiation and perceived customer value. If apple listened to gartner and lost that, they really would be dead.
It was the MS rep on the committee both times. She finally gave in, but not without a fight.
However, I'd say that the only reason this blew up was because she didn't notice the line in the first vote. Had she expressed her opinions then, we wouldn't even be hearing about the debate. But due to her corporate commitments, she didn't read the report until after she voted to support it.
I bet that that PR types in MS are letting loose with both barrels on her over this. It's more a matter of inattention than strategy.
I'd add that Google is doing really well economically. When the growth starts to slow, or when the money dries up-- even temporarily-- that's when we'll really know how resilient and positive the Google atmosphere is.
It's easy to be flat and transparent when you're hiring. When you're laying off, things get much harder for the manager. Obviously, we hope no company ever has to cut back, but history teaches us that eventually they all do.
You bought a house / condo / winnebago, didn't you? Or, at least, you're paying rent on one. That's required to play WoW too. ($1500 / month). Plus, you need electricity to power your computer, plus climate control like light and air conditioning to keep the environment conducive to play. ($200/mo, including depreciation on your air conditioner) Not to mention, you need 2000 calories a day worth of nutrition to keep yourself in fighting trim. ($600 at least-- for many it's more. If you cook, cut that number a bit, but don't forget to cost in cooking gear).
OK seriously now, economists don't measure the total costs of all required stuff all the way back to first principles for precisely this reason. You need to ask a few questions before you add these costs in. First, are these costs you would incur anyway, whether or not you play WoW? For most of the Slashdot crowd, the answer is yes. I had broadband before WoW, and I'll have it after WoW is over. Second, what is your utilization of these resources for WoW-related use relative to everything else?
The article makes a good point. Frankly, I haven't bought a new computer game since the summer of 2004 (when I started playing in the open stress test, then open beta, then release), precisely because all my gaming goes through WoW. (I haven't been on/. much either, for that matter).
Some thoughts on WoW:
First, the game is enormously enjoyable, but its colossal power as a time-sink comes more from game mechanics than from raw, seat-of-the-pants enjoyment.
Second, WoW has worked hard to offer a number of playstyles for different gamer personalities. PVP in battlegrounds feels VERY different from soloing or instance running. And they feel very different from raiding. So whereas you bought starcraft, unreal and soul calibur to scratch different kinds of itches, WoW now can be made to imperfectly fulfill all these needs.
The fact that you're playing with other people (and that you'll keep meeting them again in the future) makes it difficult to just stop playing and put the game down whenever you have to go. That means that if you go on a 5-man, you need to block out two hours (often more). If you raid, the social penalties for dropping are even greater, and you could be tied up for six hours a night or more. In the hardest core guilds, this is every day, but even casual guilds that raid are usually two nights a week.
Though most other MMORPGs are FAR more of a grind, WoW has alot of grinding in it as well. And it appeals to people who wouldn't normally get into games with heavy grinding requirements. There's grinding for battleground rewards, the honor system, raiding, reputation grinding for casual epics, grinding for cash. There's also, though most people don't understand it as grinding per se, grinding for DKP. Other games require 24/7 committment, but the difference here is that WoW drains much or all of the available time of people who actually work for a living, or go to grad school, or raise kids.
Blizzard was brilliant about its approach to account cancellation. The fact that you can pick up and play again (with your characters intact) even after cancelling for a long time means that people who left after getting bored with Blackwing Lair can come back to try Naxx.
So what's it all mean? Well it boils down to this: when I get home, I log in. When I wake up in the AM, I log in (to check auctions and try for an early morning arena trinket). I play solitaire when the servers are down, and sometimes that little pinball game that comes with XP. But that's my gaming life.
Before WoW, I played Battlefield 1942, Unreal Tournament, Civilization (in all its incarnations) and more. Now, I'm not playing even the games I own much, let alone buying them. It's not because starcraft or Civ got less fun. It's because WoW has an amazing degree of stickiness through the social obligations it creates and the grinding it encourages.
If you as a verifier can ensure the security of the reader hardware, then that's great. If not (for example, for devices sold/leased/loaned to retailers), then what you have is a vendor login and what is essentially a long passphrase. Because all you KNOW is that something claiming to be a biometric reader is logging into your verifier service and presenting a stream of digitized information.
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Really good comment, probably the best informed one I've seen on slashdot in ages :). You're dead-on correct about repackaged drugs extending patent life.
However, talking about M&A activity your argument breaks down a bit. The pharma ecology consists of a number of different players.
Big Pharma: These guys get the most attention. They have deep pockets, big sales and marketing organizations, strong distribution and manufacturing channels. They need to sell big blockbuster drugs (drugs that have huge markets like Lipitor) to justify their stock price.
Midsized Pharma: These companies are like mini versions of the big guys. They aren't as big, but do NOT need big markets to survive. They just need some good, moderate successes in niche markets.
Startups: These companies specialize in research. They outsource whatever they can, and have no manufacturing, sales or marketing. Mostly, they do research and hope to get bought out.
Academia: Big colleges and universities. They are good at research but have no ability at manufacturing, sales or marketing. They're notoriously bad at estimating the value of what they have. Many professors simply found their own startups when they think they might have something.
OK so everybody does research, but startups and academia are better at it than the big pharmas. Basically, you want a situation where the big pharmas are selling the blockbusters like Viagra or Lipitor because they can handle the capacity. You want midsized pharmas to be selling everything else because they aren't chained to the expectation that every drug needs to be a mega-hit.
So typically you see new molecules being packaged and sold to startups to explore. There are small startups that buy drug concepts from big pharmas, then run them through the approvals process. Midsized companies both buy AND sell their drug proposals. Academia has no ability to get stuff approved, so they just sell their compounds or spin them off. Big pharma used to shelve drugs that they didn't think would be big winners, but now they simply sell them to other companies that can exploit them. Everyone wins.
Once the drug is nearly approved, big and midsized pharma buys them. They pay a heavy premium, which recoups the investor's time and the risk that the drug wouldn't be approved at all. Usually, since a startup has one or two drugs in its portfolio, the pharma doesn't dick around-- they just buy the whole company. Eventually the officers leave and found new startups.
Sometimes a big pharma has a "gap" in its pipeline-- they're big moneymakers are going out of patent while the drugs they thought would be about to be released fail their clinical trial. In that situation, if they have the money they'll buy another pharma to pick up its drugs, or, if they lack cash, they get snapped up by a pharma looking to expand. Hence all the mergers and acquisitions.
Research flows downhill to smaller companies, products bubble up to the pharmas. Products that are marginal improvements, like extended release versions, are a problem but if they really weren't that much better then managed care companies and doctors would stick with the now-generic version of the original drug.
Why do drugs take so long to develop? Answer: it takes 8-10 years to get them through clinical trials. It's illegal to sell a drug without doing that, but even if you did you'd end up with flipper babies eventually. Making sure something is safe is expensive and time consuming.
Why do drugs cost so much? Answer: it costs $800 million dollars to develop a new drug. That drug can sell for 5 years or so before going out of patent.
Why do pharmas make such big profits? Answer: risk premium and time value of money. These hotshot biotech startups go bankrupt all the time. The ones that make it have to return enough to make investing in them in the first place worth it.
Why do I think that the big pharmas will do pretty well? Because they're buying
Absolutely.
Cystic Fibrosis used to be basically a death sentence by age 25. Now people with it are living into their 40's. Heart attacks are being reduced by the use of statin drugs. AIDS, once a killer, is controllable by drugs to the point where you often don't have any symptoms at all. This is true for all kinds of diseases. World death rate still 100%? Sure, but that doesn't mean progress isn't being made. We're living longer, and our quality of life is up.
If Intel were in the business of modifying CPU's they'd dug out of a closet and didn't have the schematics for, then he'd be in a position to complain. The body is an insanely complicated collection of interdependant systems-- each CELL is more complex than one of his chips, and we have trillions of cells in our bodies of innumerable different types.
Not even counting the basic research to get a drug compound in the first place, it costs 8-10 years and $800 billion dollars to develop ONE new drug. A drug that is profitable for 5 years or so before going generic due to patent law. 75 of the top 100 drugs will be going generic by 2010.
Finally, with the advent of biologics, we're getting a stream of new drugs with fewer side effects that are even more effective. The human genome was done about ten years ago, right? Well it takes a year or two to start developing compounds based on a discovery, then it takes about 8-10 years to get a drug approved by the FDA. Every time you read about a bio discovery in the newspaper, add about 12-15 years and that's the date you'll see people start getting treated.
As to what he's saying about big pharma not producing new drugs, he's totally ignoring where most of the basic research takes place: small biotech startups. Big pharma sells their drug candidates to these little companies to shepherd through approval, then buys companies about to make it big. Medium pharmas buy companies with drugs with smaller markets. What Grove said is like us saying "the computer industry sucks because Intel hasn't put out much new software".
If pharma's weren't making real discoveries, then there'd be no difference between new drugs and generics and we'd be buying all our drugs for $4 at Wal Mart. Doctors have no obligation to prescribe expensive drugs-- mine gives me generics all the time. Pharmas are under incredible pressure to get new drugs on the market, and their stock prices are determined in large part by the value of this pipeline.
I notice that Google is looking for CS degrees. In most industries, PDM is considered to be a marketing discipline. You can get a whole curriculum in product management-- in fact, some MS and PhD programs in business are focused on just that. But many companies in electronics and computer science still insist on hiring computer science majors with no experience in product management, hoping they'll just figure it out. There's a whole galaxy of people out there with multiple years of PDM experience, no formal training and whose process is basically to try to solve product vision questions using intuition alone.
Product management is more than just a bunch of judgement calls and guesstimates. It's a quantitative field of its own. Go look at product management in other fields if you don't believe that. In a novel product category (where you usually find Google products), things do get much hairier. Creativity is important, too, and young people tend to be more creative. Google should be applauded for giving these guys 2 years of training. And they're clearly looking for the "internal entrepreneur" type, which is hard to cultivate in a person. As I'm reading the article, it looks like APMs are responsible for managing people as well as products, making training even more important.
Google should be applauded for giving these guys 2 years of training. You can get your MBA in two years if you hurry-- a MS in a specialized business field like PDM can take a year or less. Google is producing people with advanced business educations without the written degree (much like IBM used to poach people who were a semester or two short of a grad school degree). As entrepreneurial types, the lack of a diploma may not even bother them.
I'd say that as a business move and a people-building move, this is an excellent idea.
The pirate community says DVD-aaaaarrrrr!!!
Maybe it's just early in the morning, but this guy just won the internet.
You can't have everything. Saving every possible article just on the off chance that it might someday BECOME notable isn't really helping anyone. If it becomes notable then just re-add the article-- your sources are there, right? You cited your sources, didn't you? If you can get an admin's help, you can even get the article undeleted. Your talk of the UN Data Purge points out that, unless there's some global conspiracy, this stuff will STILL be around.
Of course, Notability, Citations and NPOV are both critical to Wikipedia doing its job, and the sources of the more pernicious abuse by admins and heavy users. Once you know how the game is played, you can use these three policies (and bio: living persons) as an ideological battering ram to put your bias into any article you want.
I've seen very notable articles be nearly deleted by admins who (if you look at their histories) are just shooting down targets they don't agree with. Mergers and splits can be abused similarly: use a merger to delete parts you don't like. Use sub-articles to hide them where they won't see the light of day. Or do both-- divide out an article, then a few months later delete or re-merge it. Flag something as against NPOV, then GIVE it a point of view. Use citations from biased sources like lobbyist groups to justify your points, then delete other viewpoints because no source is cited. Call up an article on notability-- it often won't have people regularly watching it and you can delete it before someone realizes you proposed deletion. The best part is that many of these abuses occur from admins and contributors who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing. It's not that they're evil, it's that they're human and subject to bias like everyone else. Hell, I've sometimes caught myself pushing a POV with a persnickety policy complaint-- I hope I've never hit Save, but I can't say for sure.
Overall, I love wikipedia. I'm a regular contributor, and I believe in the value of the project. I also believe in the policies I mentioned above-- used correctly they make wikipedia something that's really useful. I'm sorry to the webcomic authors who feel abused by the system. Like I said, admins often do abuse the system, knowingly or not. Still, the system overall works and if your comic is really notable then it can survive a deletion proposal.
BTW someday I do want to write an article on how to abuse Wikipedia to advance a personal agenda. Not so people can do it, but so wikipedians can be aware of their own biases and how the system can be exploited.
Drug resistant TB is found in the US-- in an urban area where conditions are right (lots of uninsured people not getting treated, close proximity for easy transmission etc) it could flare up any time. By the time you know you have an epidemic, it's often way too late to act. And the FDA, with the most stringent guidelines, is the best proxy for other nations' regulatory boards. If the FDA has approved it, it's rare that anyone else won't.
Incidentally, doctors won't start using it immediately for that as far as FDA is concerned. A pharmaceutical will have to file for a new indication for an existing drug. This is a long expensive process. FDA is responsible for ensuring that a drug is safe and effective. We only know that it's safe so far, not effective for this indication (that requires a controlled, pre-approved Phase III doubleblind study monitored by the FDA). Many pharmas don't like studying new uses for existing drugs that are out of patent because they won't usually be able to recoup their research costs on a drug that has already gone generic.
Doctors can IIRC prescribe for the new indication anyway; but insurance coverage and pharmas being able to document the new indication has to wait for the FDA say-so.
That's the price of fame. Winners get sniped at all the time. The smart kid gets picked on. The rich, successful, high-GPA athlete at the elite university gets turned into a Duke Lacrosse player. The super-rich, powerful and/or famous get hounded by reporters and paparazzi to report their slightest missteps and humiliations. That's human nature.
Lobbyist groups like Greenpeace are made up of people who, while mostly they genuinely believe in their cause, are normal people who have careers and lives to think about. They want to build the organization so they can have people reporting to them in their department, a higher salary, and prestige in their field. They want to feel powerful. So of course they'll do unfair but publicity-grabbing showboats. It even serves their cause. More attention to Greenpeace drives funding, personnel and other organizational improvements that help them pursue their cause. More power = more attention from the press, having credibility with powerful political and business leaders, and more public awareness.
This isn't unique to Greenpeace. A great many organizations are Outrage Machines. They're the ones that decry Harry Potter, Teletubbies, the Republicans, gun companies, KFC, the Democrats, Domino's Pizza, Coors Beer, Warren Buffet, etc etc. What bothers people I think isn't the hypocrisy-- it's when Greenpeace actually comes out and admits to it. But it's behind all kinds of causes, including many that you and I believe very strongly in.
Is it ethical? Well, that's a good question. I don't have a good answer to that one, or rules that would apply more than situationally. Most lobbyists are either True Believers or very very cynical-- and I'm not sure which is worse.
Incidentally, not only is it a good idea from a logistics perspective, but you can also weaponize the transmitter. Finally, since you're collecting all that power anyway, why not beam some to construction efforts. You could ship the materials into orbit using that orbital gun that Gerald Bull was trying to build in Iraq. Ready supply of materials and energy could help us get a real foothold in orbit.
Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such informational films as "Let's Get Ready for the Iridium Standard" and "Tritium: Delicious But Deadly!"
The Slate article seems to imply that widespread broadband isn't happening. But it is-- coverage is growing at a nice clip and while we do have the problem of only at best two major players in each market (telephone and cable providers) this is a young industry and that's to be expected. I'm trying to understand exactly what the Slate guy is asking for from a customer experience perspective. From the article:
OK so what's the problem here? If customers are getting something faster, cheaper and more reliable, why does slapping a "local government" label on it make any difference? This seems to all be borne of "Government should compete with the phone company". Is that realistic, desirable or sane? I guess we could create a US Department of Lunch like the illuminati card and then bemoan our lack of municipal hamburger infrastructure because the public solution can't deliver fries like the private sector.
There is one area where municipal Wi-Fi actually isn't such a dumb idea, though. Municipalities which create robust, wide-area networks to consolidate their emergency service and public works WWANs, plus add access for city departments that typically don't get field-accessible internet. There are some real cost savings to be had doing that, mostly since these departments have redundant, mutually incompatible systems already. You get interoperability and the ability to crisis-manage for free (something the 9/11 commission argued for). In that case, you're doing something that makes sense anyway, but once your coverage footprint is in place, you can try selling or giving away the vast amounts of unused bandwidth-- usually with a proviso that you can shut them down temporarily during a public emergency to give your own services priority.
We really don't want to make the same mistake Europe did with landline phones. The US left it to the private sector (that is, the Bell system) and the Europeans tried to nationalize it, for all the great reasons the Gweihir gives. The Europeans ended up with an expensive, unreliable, tangled mess. The only good that came our of their crappy phone system was that it was so terrible that it drove Europeans to adopt wireless phones long before americans saw the need. (Of course they're so geographically concentrated that it was also just plain cheaper to set up.)
Technologists deal with complexity every day. Most of the liberals I know are humanities majors or lawyers whose interests are mostly in simple linear thinking. That is, they haven't really been taught to think strategically, or at least in their daily working lives aren't called on to plan and implement and work on complex systems. When someone on the left wing sees an economic problem (say, too many Americans without health insurance, and cripplingly high prices for healthcare), their immediate reaction is "well we'll just GIVE everyone healthcare". As new issues and objections emerge, they weave ever-more-complicated webs of regulation around their original, fairly simplistic plan.
Now you'd think that my fellow right-wingers, who recognize why this just isn't going to work in the economic realm, would realize why in cultural issues this won't work either. But of course they usually don't. Given a complex problem like drugs or the changing face of the family, the knee-jerk reaction there is again to use a gross, overt use of power to force the world to conform to their ideals. The liberals laugh, but their economic views are just as silly, and for largely the same reasons.
Any programmer, engineer, or doctor (all fairly nerdy professions) knows that if you start making major changes to a complex system, you're not likely to get anything resembling the solution you want. Because those professions deal with complexity, and since it stems from natural laws rather than social systems you can't just bluff or persuade your way out of it the way social sciences or humanities types can. So while you'll find any stream of thought in any profession, I'm not surprised that technology types are more likely to be libertarian.
It's not that Libertarians prefer simplistic solutions. It's that they prefer subtle, indirect solutions that are more respectful of the complexity and unpredictability of a society. A decade of famine in North Korea due to their socialist paradise has stunted an entire generation's growth, so Kim Jong Il put up signs in high schools that say "Grow". For all the pounds of paperwork and huge bureaucracies and tens of thousands of exceptions, clauses and loopholes, most big government solutions have the underlying sophistication of those posters.
Those are good examples, and you make a great point at low and mid-levels, but when you get to high level play you can easily add 10 minutes per day of Spider Climb to your boots for 7,200gp. At that point, costs like that are a rounding error. Or better yet, buy an item that gives you flight-- not only do you never need to worry about jump or climb again (except in antimagic fields), but you also can bypass content and travel more swiftly. You no longer need a mount or other transport other than as a tactical choice (eg mounted combat). You have a potent kiting mechanism against many ground-only monsters.
:)
Sure there are situational cases where Climb or Jump are still useful; but those are so rare that at high level play you're likely to jump less often than you are to use Use Rope. RP purists can still buy those skills (along with Profession: Basketweaver) but D&D is designed around combat, so you're shooting yourself in the foot if you do. Ideally, D&D shouldn't punish you for good RP; games like World of Darkness actually reward it. Ideally since skills cost the same they should be similar in overall utility; you'll never be perfectly balanced but it's like setting a level for a spell: if it's a spell you couldn't imagine NOT getting it then it's too powerful and if you can't imagine ever blowing a valuable spell slot or action casting it then it's not powerful enough.
Some people think that roleplaying and gaming are mutually incompatible-- or at least compete with one another. At times, that's true, but it needn't be so. We power-game in real life. My friend who had a high Int dumped all his skill points into "Knowledge: Computer Programming" to maximize his weekly skill check to earn the maximum number of gold pieces. Another friend, who has a high Cha score, splurged on masterwork clothing (+2 to diplomacy checks) and constantly socializes (checks Diplomacy) to maximize people's attitude towards him. These friends give him business connections (Aid Another on his weekly profession check), let him in on the latest gossip (aid another on his already-good Gather Information score) and do him favors (since they are Helpful towards him). He also has had a string of great girlfriends, which I can't put into D&D terms because I don't know the system for seduction, but you get the point.
Is that min-maxing? Sure! And it's definitely true to life because it is real life.
Agreed.
I'm chuckling at people who think any change to simplify the system is a change for the worse. The Hackmaster crowd can always play Shadowrun if they want an evershifting catalog of contradictory rules and exceptions.
Obviously, the proof is in the pudding, but for now what I'm hearing about D&D 4.0 is very positive. There are lots of rules like grappling that bear no relation to the other game rules and which grind the game to a halt when you try to use them. There are skills like Use Rope which are clearly inferior to other uses of your skill points, like Spot or Use Magic Device. Other skills and abilities quickly become obsolete: e.g. Climb, Heal and Jump (both are replaced by spells). Gear, especially flat +stats items, has become the end-all and be-all of advancement. And the endless prep work and bookkeeping, especially for the GM, is a waste of time and detracts from the fun of the game.
Plus, a game needs a reboot from time to time. AD&D became bloated with endless supplements, kits and spells that eventually made play completely impenetrable. 3.5 is heading in the same direction. YOu can't stop that, but you can occassionally reboot, reproducing and refining the stuff that works and dumping or rewriting the stuff that doesn't.
None of this is specific to newbies, either. Hard-core players would love to have a simplier but still thematically and tactically rich game, because then you can have five fights a night instead of three. Or your GM can afford to make the same three fights much more interesting, unique and challenging. Or you can free up some time for, G-d forbid, actually RP your character.
There are tons of games out there with clunky rules if you want difficulty and tedium for its own sake. I'm cheering for D&D because while I love 3.5, I can see the game becoming much more fun.
Tabletop still has a niche.
First, there's physical proximity. It's an excuse to sit down with a bunch of friends, pop open a beer and enjoy yourself. You can't quite match that in a MMORPG, even with Teamspeak.
Second, there's creativity. My experience in MMORPGs is that there's endless grinding of trash mobs, highly scripted raid encounters that you fight every week the same way, and PVP battles that are exciting but still pretty much scripted. A good DM designs all kinds of weird and interesting encounters, including conversational RP encounters.
Finally, there's the "greatest hero ever" effect. In a MMORPG, you can't ALL be the great hero of the world. Ultimately, everyone has to be roughly balanced with one another. Even the top-end raiders and PVPers on the server, while great and well geared, aren't going to change the game world any. And everyone else doesn't even have a name for themselves. In a pen-and-paper setting you and your friends really can do world-shaking events. You can down Illidan and he STAYS DEAD. (mostly)
OK so let me wrap it all together. In my weekly D&D game, I get together with friends who live up to an hour away in every direction. We meet up, grab some drinks, talk about how things are going face to face, and then get down to the game. One of us is a ruthless mercenary ranger, another is a minotaur who just completed his plot to be crowned Emperor of the Minotaur Empire, another is a warlock who is finally realizing his goal of revenge against the red dragons, and another is a mystic who attained godhood. We've been playing for five years, from level one to our current (epic) game. We now run two side games in the same world-- one game we play our own lowbie minions, and the other we are actually starting to play mid-level antagonists. When we do world-shaking things, the world actually shakes and stays shaken. Our actions have permanent consequences, our enemies and allies react to us (and try to pre-empt us), and we have to consider the economic, political, social and religious consequences of our actions.
None of this is possible, even remotely, in a MMORPG. I love WoW, I play avidly. I've got a 70 and am working on two more. I PvP avidly, and am in an end-game raiding guild. To some extent, WoW and D&D do scratch the same itch, but neither is a good substitute for the other.
Gaming is cyclical. Alot of the reason that D&D 3.0 did so well was that people hadn't played D&D in a while.
The D&D-style fantasy settings have dominated for several years now. And d20 drives a certain vision of playstyle and progression that also has a deadly sameness if it's the only system you use. So while I love D&D 3.5, I do hunger for something different and would love to see something new pop up. Not to replace D&D, just to bring something fresh in.
The time is ripe for a new fad in gaming, be it World of Darkness or some other venerable setting. My concern above is that White Wolf doesn't have the pocketbook or the people to take advantage of the opportunity.
Most of the talent that was at White Wolf for their big successes is long gone. I'm a big fan of the WoD, but we have to be honest about their ability to create new content. Certainly, WoTC brought D&D back from boredom-- but they did it with a top-notch development team. White Wolf could be well-positioned as an alternative to D&D now that they're so dominant again if they get the talent.
Honestly, this might be a cheaper way for CCP to be buying the gaming rights to the WoD. The assets are worth more than the organization in this case.
Yeah best of breed is often not the best solution given integration costs... but I think that that has more to do with the way purchasing processes work. Going single source has up-front, obvious tradeoffs. Best of breed you get exactly what you want, and if you've been investing months into the purchase process you feel like you're getting more for your work by cobbling a solution together. And in some cases, you do.
I think this is a lesson to people who would participate in fanac: do not cooperate with a studio or publisher's viral marketing programs. Instead, if you are going to participate at all, you need to avoid any contact or interaction with the studio, and behave as if they were hostile to fan promotion and viral marketing from the get-go. The lesson is that just because Universal was actively encouraging it before, doesn't mean that they can't or won't go after you later. Notice that they didn't try to communicate with the fan base, they encouraged fan promotion, then issued the C&D letters.
IANAL, but even if the fan sites are 100% in the clear legally, the costs of defending yourself against legal action will be enormous. This is what they count on: the ability to intimidate through the sheer cost and time of a lawsuit. It's why the trial lawyers spend huge amounts of money blocking tort reform. They win even if they lose, because their lawyers are salaried and you can't afford to fight them.
And according to the article, Universal isn't just going after 11th Hour for trademarks that they own. They're trying to claim ownership of the word "serenity" itself, and the chinese character for the word. In other words, even fan material that doesn't overtly use a trademark or copyright is vulnerable to a crippling lawsuit.
Personally, I like sapphires more anyway, and with the Russian Hydrothermal sapphires being as good as they are, I get a great lab-created equivalent there too.
Hrmm, then what's my choice?
Total no-brainer.
Exactly! Many of apple's "software" value is actually in hardware. The comparative stability of their platform, their control over the overall user experience, all stems from their control of their hardware platform.
Also, from a business strategy perspective, Dell's company may be pursuing operational excellence, but Apple's value discipline is product leadership. If Apple tried to compete on cost, it would lose-- economies of scale alone would be against it, plus much more. Apple's value is that they have in the customer's eye a far superior product, one that people are willing to pay a premium on. You think that Apple could keep its already-slim market share if they became a commodity? Of course not, apple's strength has always been that they play their own game in their own little protected part of the market.
The accounting value of improving or preserving margins is far outweighed by the strategic value of their product differentiation and perceived customer value. If apple listened to gartner and lost that, they really would be dead.
It was the MS rep on the committee both times. She finally gave in, but not without a fight.
However, I'd say that the only reason this blew up was because she didn't notice the line in the first vote. Had she expressed her opinions then, we wouldn't even be hearing about the debate. But due to her corporate commitments, she didn't read the report until after she voted to support it.
I bet that that PR types in MS are letting loose with both barrels on her over this. It's more a matter of inattention than strategy.
VERY good point here.
I'd add that Google is doing really well economically. When the growth starts to slow, or when the money dries up-- even temporarily-- that's when we'll really know how resilient and positive the Google atmosphere is.
It's easy to be flat and transparent when you're hiring. When you're laying off, things get much harder for the manager. Obviously, we hope no company ever has to cut back, but history teaches us that eventually they all do.
You bought a house / condo / winnebago, didn't you? Or, at least, you're paying rent on one. That's required to play WoW too. ($1500 / month). Plus, you need electricity to power your computer, plus climate control like light and air conditioning to keep the environment conducive to play. ($200/mo, including depreciation on your air conditioner) Not to mention, you need 2000 calories a day worth of nutrition to keep yourself in fighting trim. ($600 at least-- for many it's more. If you cook, cut that number a bit, but don't forget to cost in cooking gear).
OK seriously now, economists don't measure the total costs of all required stuff all the way back to first principles for precisely this reason. You need to ask a few questions before you add these costs in. First, are these costs you would incur anyway, whether or not you play WoW? For most of the Slashdot crowd, the answer is yes. I had broadband before WoW, and I'll have it after WoW is over. Second, what is your utilization of these resources for WoW-related use relative to everything else?
The article makes a good point. Frankly, I haven't bought a new computer game since the summer of 2004 (when I started playing in the open stress test, then open beta, then release), precisely because all my gaming goes through WoW. (I haven't been on
Some thoughts on WoW:
So what's it all mean? Well it boils down to this: when I get home, I log in. When I wake up in the AM, I log in (to check auctions and try for an early morning arena trinket). I play solitaire when the servers are down, and sometimes that little pinball game that comes with XP. But that's my gaming life.
Before WoW, I played Battlefield 1942, Unreal Tournament, Civilization (in all its incarnations) and more. Now, I'm not playing even the games I own much, let alone buying them. It's not because starcraft or Civ got less fun. It's because WoW has an amazing degree of stickiness through the social obligations it creates and the grinding it encourages.
If you as a verifier can ensure the security of the reader hardware, then that's great. If not (for example, for devices sold/leased/loaned to retailers), then what you have is a vendor login and what is essentially a long passphrase. Because all you KNOW is that something claiming to be a biometric reader is logging into your verifier service and presenting a stream of digitized information.