Walmart was getting into an area it didn't need to be in. Sure, they've got a gargantuan distribution network established, but when it comes to soliciting customers, they lose on the internet. They win in brick-and-mortar because they are everywhere, open 24/7, and stock a huge selection of crap. On the internet, everyone stocks an equally huge selection of crap, is open 24/7, and they lose their competitive advantage. Unlike their online music distribution service, the DVD rental-by-mail service carries massive overhead with it that is a financial liability.
People consider Netflix the 'little guy' because some stock analysts have predicted doom for them going against Blockbuster and Walmart. This news represents traction that Netflix has found against its competition. Ultimately, I would not be surprised if Blockbuster bought out Netflix. They did this in the early nineties when Sound Warehouse rented video tapes for fifty-cents.
I wouldn't be surprised if Mark Cuban hires a team of engineers to cobble together a prototype of this system. Then he could dog-and-pony-show it around the country and get a crapload of investors to fund a startup based on this concept. Then just before hitting the market, where your points would all be clearly demonstrated, Cuban would sell his stake in the startup to the rest of the goofs who invested in it. mo-money, mo-money, mo-money.
At the router level, you can prioritize packet types. It is no big deal to lower the VOip traffic to ensure web users maintain acceptable bandwidth. In most installations, people apply the reverse standard in prioritizing VOIP over http, but in the cafe scenario, I can see it going this way.
I'm treading on really uncertain grounds, so please clarify wherever I'm confused.
Right now, Red Hat is able to pay salaries, etc. through its cash holdings generated by the IPO and its modest revenue. If Redhat sells to Microsoft and the principals leave, the IPO cash stays with Microsoft and the only people getting paid are the shareholders. For the principals to start a new company, they'd need to get a huge investment to be able to pay salaries until it went public or enjoyed profitability. I suppose the principals could fund it out of their own personal profits from the Microsoft sale...
One thing missing in their new company, though, is the huge IPO warchest Redhat won during the late nineties tech IPO craze. I'm guessing these folks would have to turn to IBM for funding or absorbtion.
I like Apple, but their products are too expensive.
Talk to an economist about the current pricing strategies at Apple. They'll tell you Apple is using smart pricing. If you are producing at 100% of your capacity and you are selling everything you make, then your MBAs will tell you that your prices are too low. Raise prices until sales drop to just below your peak production capacity.
As proof, Apple created and dominated the hard-drive MP3 player market in short order with the iPod at the price they chose. Maybe you don't own one, but millions of other people do. You are in the margin of consumers who rejected their pricing and I think Apple is fine with that because this margin represents a smaller loss in potential profit than if they lowered prices to convert you to a customer and then those other millions of sales would have netted a smaller revenue. I know that was a monstorously run-on sentence-- please forgive my inability to communicate this concept. I'm listening to my iPod while I type this.
You bring up an interesting point. How would they catch a passed ball? I'm imagining an air-cannon with laser targeting. The laser could even be used to tell the recipient of the toss that a ball was coming from a particular direction so the reciever could optimally position its catching basket. Perhaps that could also be communicated via radio frequencies.
The shooting algorithm could even be optimized to consider the speed of the thrower and receiver.
With all due respect, think about how zombies get recruited... By other zombies!
You're right, though. In most cases, these botnet-building worms don't alter stuff in the docroot of servers because it would alert the owner of the server's zombie status and likely result in a flushing of the infected filesystem. I just wanted to mention that the function of zombies is not limited to DDOS attacks.
I fully empathize with you. I don't have kids, but when I do, I'll want to give them the original fundamentals of creativity. Unfortunately, I fear that they'll also be exposed to the modern versions of these tools through television, school, and peers. This exposure will likely result in them being dissatisfied with the legos we'll provide our kids.
We'll tell them, "But these are better. You really use your imagination with them!"
Their friends will likely whisper, "Wow. Her dad is such a miser. He won't buy any new toys!"
I paid $1800 for a B/W G3 450mhz box in 1998 and used that sucker for desktop publishing and even DV editing until mid 2004. Then I finally bought a G4 powerbook and retired the G3. Mac OS X (everything up through Panther) ran fine for me on that G3 and I never noticed a bottleneck in terms of the video card nor did I upgrade any internal components other than memory and hard drives. Six years on the same computer does not sound like a throw-away product to me.
On the plus side, Last Call won't mean the end to your drinking at this bar. After they lock the doors, I'm sure there'll be windows or some other back entrance that can be easily opened back up.
I fully agree with your observation regarding the "community economies." One of the strongest examples of this in a product release was the original iMac. Apple (Steve Jobs) had the guts to release that computer with no floppy drive, but more radical, no serial port. It was USB only. This meant no compatibility with legacy printers or scanner products. At the time, there weren't even any USB inkjet printers on the market. People fumed. But then the peripheral vendors saw the huge sales of the iMac, and the vacuum for peripherals, and big players like HP rushed their USB inkjets into the market.
Some other industry player, I forget who, once credited Steve Jobs to the success of the USB interface. Without this move, the PC mobo makers never had an incentive to add the additional interface while there was little demand from consumers. Likewise, the peripheral vendors never saw a need to add USB support in their drivers and hardware without a critical mass of compatible PC motherboards.
When the grandparent poster mentioned have you seen any commercial apps in it I think he meant 'software you can buy' written in dot net.. Can you buy anything from a vendor written in dot net? Is there a peoplesoft application released that is built on dot net? That sort of thing.
The apps install in a minute, they're rock solid, and they're fast. If you need an excuse to move up to Mac OS X, Microsoft Office v. X might just be it.
...the Mac version of Office makes the Windows version look like something designed in the last century.
Since you're using a powerbook, which is what I also am using, I've got two suggestions that might improve your performance in Office-- Install 512mb of ram if you are trying to get by with 256mb. Also, if you've enabled filevault, disable it. I just don't believe your experience is the norm. Hopefully these suggestions will help.
Unless this guy works in the Apple skunkworks, this is highly impossible. Nice try, troll. The rest of his post is suspect as well... The OS X native version of Office sucks?!? Wonder why MS's Mac OS X development team keeps receiving accolades for it...
Seth
I used to deal with PDF technical docs at my last job. We had 18 volumes of user guides and when you had to find the definition of a specific term without knowing how it fit into the scheme of things, searching those 18 volumes was a real chore.
I've been using Google's desktop search a lot at my current job. It might eventually help with your PDF problems. Currently, it doesn't seem to index PDF content, but their regular websearch does. So perhaps they'll add that functionality in the near future.
I'm looking forward to Spotlight in Tiger. I like getting straight to information with Google's search toolbar a lot. Like when I need to find a person's email address, previously, I'd have to open my mail program, re-sort the mail list by name instead of date, then scroll to find the person's name. Now, I just type the person's name in the Google desktop search field, and it retrieves the text of the emails from that person and usually their email address is right there.
Dave Grohl is more than Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl was Scream. He was Nirvana. He is Queens of the Stone Age. He is Probot.
After all this material, he's still coming up with fresh ideas. I don't know of anyone else working in contemporary music who can claim this. Maybe Dr. Dre, I suppose. And a few other producers like him.
...returning to the types of films he wanted to make when he started out.
I fully agree with your summation here. I am doubtful, however, that he'll succeed in this effort. This is the dream of any aged artist. Oh, if Metallica could record another album of the caliber of "Kill 'em All"!! Or if Slayer could create another "Reign in Blood." Or the Beastie Boys could revisit "Paul's Boutique" again.
They can't. Maturity and success has fogged their third eye. It's only a very rare breed of successful artists who can maintain the vision of their youth to create a whole life's worth of interesting works. In this category, I'd put Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Rick Nielson (Cheap Trick), Dave Grohl, Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorcese, Robert Rodriquez, and I don't know who else.
Success has affected Lucas probably worse than maturity. Maturity is what made him revise his earlier films to be more "kid-friendly" (Greedo did not shoot first). It's what inspired him to create Jar-Jar Binks-- to him, that's what would appeal to kids. Through maturity, he lost touch with the child mind, and instead projects the parent ideal of the child mind.
But these are problems he has making kids' films. Even if he were to attempt an adult film like THX1138, he'd fail because of how success has tainted him. He's got too much money to throw on the screen and he doesn't know when to hold back and let the audience's imagination fill in the blanks. As a storyteller, he is compelled to spoonfeed it with explicit detail. How could he recover?!? Give him a budget of only $1 million and someone else's R rated script. The slim budget will force an economy on his storytelling that will inspire creativity within Lucas. He'll have to figure out other ways to get key points across rather than sweeping 3-D CGI landscapes. The R rated script will keep him in the mind of the adults who grew up watching his earlier works.
Oh well. What do I know. I've never made a movie longer than 5 minutes on anything bigger than super 8 film.
1 - How much will it cost to reinstall everything? That's IT time, == $$$.
Coming from years of work in the private sector, this is how I recognize IT architecture changes. Recently, I started working for a state agency. In the state govt. there's "no expense" associated with people doing work. Like staffing is a seperate budget that doesn't get screwed with. All other assets, now those are budget line items. Department heads, in this economic climate, are eager to slash any cost off these budgets.
This is what can really help with the adoption of open source technology. For instance, we just switched IDEs from CodeGuide to Eclipse for all developers.
I hope you didn't read my post and interpret it to mean I was knocking having all those things. In no way did I intend for my comment to come across that way, but I can see how it might. I was mostly just responding to the conformist view of what adults are expected to be doing with their time. I really wasn't trying to criticize choices people have made within their own lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Walmart was getting into an area it didn't need to be in. Sure, they've got a gargantuan distribution network established, but when it comes to soliciting customers, they lose on the internet. They win in brick-and-mortar because they are everywhere, open 24/7, and stock a huge selection of crap. On the internet, everyone stocks an equally huge selection of crap, is open 24/7, and they lose their competitive advantage. Unlike their online music distribution service, the DVD rental-by-mail service carries massive overhead with it that is a financial liability.
People consider Netflix the 'little guy' because some stock analysts have predicted doom for them going against Blockbuster and Walmart. This news represents traction that Netflix has found against its competition. Ultimately, I would not be surprised if Blockbuster bought out Netflix. They did this in the early nineties when Sound Warehouse rented video tapes for fifty-cents.
I think it had credits when that old guy and his family is walking to the cemetary. Seth
I wouldn't be surprised if Mark Cuban hires a team of engineers to cobble together a prototype of this system. Then he could dog-and-pony-show it around the country and get a crapload of investors to fund a startup based on this concept. Then just before hitting the market, where your points would all be clearly demonstrated, Cuban would sell his stake in the startup to the rest of the goofs who invested in it. mo-money, mo-money, mo-money.
Seth
At the router level, you can prioritize packet types. It is no big deal to lower the VOip traffic to ensure web users maintain acceptable bandwidth. In most installations, people apply the reverse standard in prioritizing VOIP over http, but in the cafe scenario, I can see it going this way.
Seth
I'm treading on really uncertain grounds, so please clarify wherever I'm confused.
Right now, Red Hat is able to pay salaries, etc. through its cash holdings generated by the IPO and its modest revenue. If Redhat sells to Microsoft and the principals leave, the IPO cash stays with Microsoft and the only people getting paid are the shareholders. For the principals to start a new company, they'd need to get a huge investment to be able to pay salaries until it went public or enjoyed profitability. I suppose the principals could fund it out of their own personal profits from the Microsoft sale...
Seth
I also think that's what they'd do.
One thing missing in their new company, though, is the huge IPO warchest Redhat won during the late nineties tech IPO craze. I'm guessing these folks would have to turn to IBM for funding or absorbtion.
Seth
I like Apple, but their products are too expensive.
Talk to an economist about the current pricing strategies at Apple. They'll tell you Apple is using smart pricing. If you are producing at 100% of your capacity and you are selling everything you make, then your MBAs will tell you that your prices are too low. Raise prices until sales drop to just below your peak production capacity.
As proof, Apple created and dominated the hard-drive MP3 player market in short order with the iPod at the price they chose. Maybe you don't own one, but millions of other people do. You are in the margin of consumers who rejected their pricing and I think Apple is fine with that because this margin represents a smaller loss in potential profit than if they lowered prices to convert you to a customer and then those other millions of sales would have netted a smaller revenue. I know that was a monstorously run-on sentence-- please forgive my inability to communicate this concept. I'm listening to my iPod while I type this.
seth
yeah, what the AC said.. Seth
You bring up an interesting point. How would they catch a passed ball? I'm imagining an air-cannon with laser targeting. The laser could even be used to tell the recipient of the toss that a ball was coming from a particular direction so the reciever could optimally position its catching basket. Perhaps that could also be communicated via radio frequencies.
The shooting algorithm could even be optimized to consider the speed of the thrower and receiver.
Seth
yes, we live in an IE world, deal with it
Dear 26 year old records clerk,
fuck you.
With all due respect, think about how zombies get recruited... By other zombies!
You're right, though. In most cases, these botnet-building worms don't alter stuff in the docroot of servers because it would alert the owner of the server's zombie status and likely result in a flushing of the infected filesystem. I just wanted to mention that the function of zombies is not limited to DDOS attacks.
Seth
Have you checked out iCal?
Seth
I fully empathize with you. I don't have kids, but when I do, I'll want to give them the original fundamentals of creativity. Unfortunately, I fear that they'll also be exposed to the modern versions of these tools through television, school, and peers. This exposure will likely result in them being dissatisfied with the legos we'll provide our kids.
We'll tell them, "But these are better. You really use your imagination with them!"
Their friends will likely whisper, "Wow. Her dad is such a miser. He won't buy any new toys!"
Apple designs throw away computers.
I paid $1800 for a B/W G3 450mhz box in 1998 and used that sucker for desktop publishing and even DV editing until mid 2004. Then I finally bought a G4 powerbook and retired the G3. Mac OS X (everything up through Panther) ran fine for me on that G3 and I never noticed a bottleneck in terms of the video card nor did I upgrade any internal components other than memory and hard drives. Six years on the same computer does not sound like a throw-away product to me.
On the plus side, Last Call won't mean the end to your drinking at this bar. After they lock the doors, I'm sure there'll be windows or some other back entrance that can be easily opened back up.
I fully agree with your observation regarding the "community economies." One of the strongest examples of this in a product release was the original iMac. Apple (Steve Jobs) had the guts to release that computer with no floppy drive, but more radical, no serial port. It was USB only. This meant no compatibility with legacy printers or scanner products. At the time, there weren't even any USB inkjet printers on the market. People fumed. But then the peripheral vendors saw the huge sales of the iMac, and the vacuum for peripherals, and big players like HP rushed their USB inkjets into the market.
Some other industry player, I forget who, once credited Steve Jobs to the success of the USB interface. Without this move, the PC mobo makers never had an incentive to add the additional interface while there was little demand from consumers. Likewise, the peripheral vendors never saw a need to add USB support in their drivers and hardware without a critical mass of compatible PC motherboards.
When the grandparent poster mentioned have you seen any commercial apps in it I think he meant 'software you can buy' written in dot net.. Can you buy anything from a vendor written in dot net? Is there a peoplesoft application released that is built on dot net? That sort of thing.
Seth
Your experience is out of the oridinary. Here's how MacAddict reviewed Office v.X in 2002-- Here's Wired's review of Office for Mac OS X-- Since you're using a powerbook, which is what I also am using, I've got two suggestions that might improve your performance in Office-- Install 512mb of ram if you are trying to get by with 256mb. Also, if you've enabled filevault, disable it. I just don't believe your experience is the norm. Hopefully these suggestions will help.
Seth
I have a G5 Powerbook at work...
Unless this guy works in the Apple skunkworks, this is highly impossible. Nice try, troll. The rest of his post is suspect as well... The OS X native version of Office sucks?!? Wonder why MS's Mac OS X development team keeps receiving accolades for it...
Seth
I used to deal with PDF technical docs at my last job. We had 18 volumes of user guides and when you had to find the definition of a specific term without knowing how it fit into the scheme of things, searching those 18 volumes was a real chore.
I've been using Google's desktop search a lot at my current job. It might eventually help with your PDF problems. Currently, it doesn't seem to index PDF content, but their regular websearch does. So perhaps they'll add that functionality in the near future. I'm looking forward to Spotlight in Tiger. I like getting straight to information with Google's search toolbar a lot. Like when I need to find a person's email address, previously, I'd have to open my mail program, re-sort the mail list by name instead of date, then scroll to find the person's name. Now, I just type the person's name in the Google desktop search field, and it retrieves the text of the emails from that person and usually their email address is right there.
Seth
Dave Grohl is more than Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl was Scream. He was Nirvana. He is Queens of the Stone Age. He is Probot.
After all this material, he's still coming up with fresh ideas. I don't know of anyone else working in contemporary music who can claim this. Maybe Dr. Dre, I suppose. And a few other producers like him.
I fully agree with your summation here. I am doubtful, however, that he'll succeed in this effort. This is the dream of any aged artist. Oh, if Metallica could record another album of the caliber of "Kill 'em All"!! Or if Slayer could create another "Reign in Blood." Or the Beastie Boys could revisit "Paul's Boutique" again.
They can't. Maturity and success has fogged their third eye. It's only a very rare breed of successful artists who can maintain the vision of their youth to create a whole life's worth of interesting works. In this category, I'd put Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Rick Nielson (Cheap Trick), Dave Grohl, Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorcese, Robert Rodriquez, and I don't know who else.
Success has affected Lucas probably worse than maturity. Maturity is what made him revise his earlier films to be more "kid-friendly" (Greedo did not shoot first). It's what inspired him to create Jar-Jar Binks-- to him, that's what would appeal to kids. Through maturity, he lost touch with the child mind, and instead projects the parent ideal of the child mind.
But these are problems he has making kids' films. Even if he were to attempt an adult film like THX1138, he'd fail because of how success has tainted him. He's got too much money to throw on the screen and he doesn't know when to hold back and let the audience's imagination fill in the blanks. As a storyteller, he is compelled to spoonfeed it with explicit detail. How could he recover?!? Give him a budget of only $1 million and someone else's R rated script. The slim budget will force an economy on his storytelling that will inspire creativity within Lucas. He'll have to figure out other ways to get key points across rather than sweeping 3-D CGI landscapes. The R rated script will keep him in the mind of the adults who grew up watching his earlier works.
Oh well. What do I know. I've never made a movie longer than 5 minutes on anything bigger than super 8 film.
1 - How much will it cost to reinstall everything? That's IT time, == $$$.
Coming from years of work in the private sector, this is how I recognize IT architecture changes. Recently, I started working for a state agency. In the state govt. there's "no expense" associated with people doing work. Like staffing is a seperate budget that doesn't get screwed with. All other assets, now those are budget line items. Department heads, in this economic climate, are eager to slash any cost off these budgets.
This is what can really help with the adoption of open source technology. For instance, we just switched IDEs from CodeGuide to Eclipse for all developers.
I hope you didn't read my post and interpret it to mean I was knocking having all those things. In no way did I intend for my comment to come across that way, but I can see how it might. I was mostly just responding to the conformist view of what adults are expected to be doing with their time. I really wasn't trying to criticize choices people have made within their own lives.
Cool article. Thanks. Seth