A typical music fan who buys a CD might use that CD at home, take that CD in the car, make a tape of that CD, rip it to their hard drive - or using it as part of a compilation, play that CD with friends and for friends, and keep that CD for many years. That's probably why most consumers, when asked, describe CDs as a good value. At the same time, when asked directly whether CDs cost too much, some consumers will say yes! Why the contradiction? Because some consumers don't understand why the sales tag on a CD is so much higher than the cost of producing the actual physical disc, a cost, which in fact, has decreased over the years.
This is a statement which could be used to point to abuse of monopoly power by the RIAA. There is a false logic being used here, that is, that if the cost of the product is less than I'm willing to pay, then it's fairly priced. That is not how competitive markets work; competitive markets price at a level where excess profit is minimized. By forcing prices above this level, the RIAA demonstrates its monopoly power, pricing at monopoly-revenue-maximizing price rather than free market price, and showing huge excess profits which are still growing.
Monopolies still offer "value" to people; they sell products at prices which are lower than the price at which buyers are willing to pay. However, competitive markets offer much more value (more "profit" for the consumers, less for the corporations, and more overall), and have been shown in theory and practice to be superior.
A long time ago, Apple had an alliance with Netscape (then still a stellarly successful browser company). Then MS invested $100m in Apple, and consequently Apple dropped Netscape and standardised on MSIE.
Apple standardized on MSIE in exchange for a promise for MS to continue development of MS Office for the Mac. Without MS Office, Apple would probably be dead.
I'm not sure what the $100m investment was for, but it has certainly paid off, as it is worth over $300m now.
- For preventing the creative works of artists from falling into the hands of an unpaying public -
I for one am quite glad that Lars, Metallica's drummer, is fighting for the rights of artists everywhere to have complete control over their intellectual property: http://www.metallica.com/news/2000/napfaq.html. I believe that his next target should be the Napster-like scourge which has been allowed to propagate for several centuries, the "Public Library".
These "Libraries" take the COPYRIGHTED work of artists and distribute them for FREE to the community, despite having NEVER been given permission to do so. They wrest control of the valuable work out of the hands of the artists; libraries are nothing more than greedy thieves. Why is it okay to get works of literature for free? Why should it be free, when it costs authors time and money to write and publish it? Libraries exist for one reason and one reason only; to pirate literature, nothing more, nothing less. The same people who frequent these Libraries are the same type who frequent Napster--crooked teenagers and college students. Worst of all, who funds this scourge? YOUR VERY OWN GOVERNMENT. Yes, your tax dollars are going to fund this theft of intellectual property.
These "Libraries" will be the DEATH of literature. Metallica must fight for what is right on behalf of the many authors who cannot afford it because so many "Library Patrons" have already stolen their work. I have heard that some of these greedy Library organizations have even expanded their theft into free distribution of music and videos. Who will save our children from this evil?
Executability isn't an issue. It still comes down to how braindead your mail client is. Let's say a company called Macrosoft made this unix email reader called Inlook, and by default it was configured to execute ".pl" attachments under perl if you double clicked on them. Let's say this particular perl program would sit around and watch your mailqueue to grab addresses, and send itself off to all those addresses. The same type of spreading would be accomplished. This would be possible if as many dumb people used linux as windows, and if as many people used Inlook as Outlook.
In other words, spreading of the email is primarily a user and a client issue, not an OS one. The consequences on the system where the worm is run is an OS issue.
MacOS X has been shipping for well over a year. MacOS XServer is available at your local Apple Vendor or direct from Apple. What everyone is talking about is the MacOS X Workstation implementation.
As far as I know, there is no "MacOS X Workstation"; The product currently known as Mac OS X server will be junked when Mac OS X is released. There's no two OS strategy, aside from maintaining OS 9 for legacy machines and applications.
Imagine Apple selling a proprietary GUI to run on top of Linux. Distributors could pay Apple to have it be part of their distribution.
This wouldn't work. You cannot wedge a GUI on to a system which is not designed for that GUI. You could offer a window manager that looked like a Mac (hey, mlvwm!), but a window manager does not a GUI make.
NASA's current budget, adjusted for inflation, is not much lower than what it was in the peak of the Apollo program
You are either trolling, or are uninformed. From http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4212/ ch4-3.html, a peak in NASA budget was $5.25 billion in 1965. That is $28.5 billion in 2000 dollars.
From http://www.nationalacademies.org/ssb/rapch4.htm, the 1998 NASA budget was 13.64 billion. That is $14.3 billion in 2000 dollars. Furthermore, today's NASA has a much broader range of activities, so the amount actually spent directly towards space flight is even smaller.
The fires aren't anywhere close to out yet, but the town is probably in the clear now, along with most lab property.
The fires aren't at all a surprise; the lab expects them. There are wildfires burning in the area almost every summer. When i was there in the summer of 1998, there were fires on a nearby hill, with smoke reaching the town for several days. In 1996, there was a fire which reached edge of lab property.
Because there is so much preparation for such an event, it's improbable that there will be severe problems. The only issue i know of is that some of the canyons which are burning were used as dumping sites long ago, but the levels of radioactivity are nothing to write home about.
Sure, it's risky. What isn't? What you need to do to make that into a useful statement is to quantify the risk, and compare it to other power generation activities.
Coal mining cuts short the lives of thousands of miners. There are thousands of natural gas explosions every year, yet we have it piped into our houses. Air pollution from fossil fuel burning plants are responsible for the death of over ten thousand people in the US per year. Hydroelectric dams are very dangerous to construct, and occasionally they burst. Furthermore, the risk of global warming due primarily to fossil fuel burning is a tremendously large one for the future.
The primary reason that nuclear power isn't successful in America is its cost.
Microsoft's stock actually faces very much volatility, because so much of their profit comes from taking advantage of tax loopholes that are made possible by their increasing stock price. This pyramid scheme has been described by Bill Parish, and several other sources (including The Economist on 8/7/1999). You can also take a look at MSFT's annual reports for more details on where their income comes from. I believe these have been previously discussed on slashdot.
Being no longer able to rely on a stock price which doubles every year, MSFT won't be able to profit as much from these loopholes. Furthermore, they will probably need to offer either higher salaries or a better options package if they want to retain employees.
What happens when the stock is wounded? Profits fall. What happens when profits fall?
Yep, Joker.com has worked fine for me as well, although I haven't tried any big changes with the registrations. The best part is that as the Euro falls in value, Joker.com just keeps getting cheaper!
That's precisely what i'm looking for in a video card. I ended up getting a v3 because they were cheap, and work decently at 1600x1200. I don't care much for 3d.
However, I'm very impressed at what the video card manufacturers have been able to accomplish. This is how competitive markets should work. Each company pushes the other, lowers prices, raises performance. Some go out of business. Can you imagine how good our spreadsheets could have been if there were still 5-6 competitors instead of a monopoly situation? sigh...
Most of the arguments in these threads use a slippery slope argument, i.e. "if Apple can sue people for making look-alike computers, the next thing you'll know, reynolds plastic wrap will be suing Apple for being transparent". The slippery slope argument is just plain dumb and illogical; it tends to be used by people who believe in all-or-nothing as opposed to careful balances and equilibria.
Clearly there is some degree by which people need to have their work protected. If there were no protection, people would have less incentive to produce creative work such as the iMac case. Analagously, we allow patents to have a 17 year monopoly. However, protecting it too broadly leads to ridiculous lawsuits, and restriction of advancement.
The field of IP/Patent/Copyright law deals with this. The goal is to finding the right level of protection which provides the best overall result. In my opinion, this system works better in the US than in any other country.
I found that the WinCE^H^H^H^H^HPalmPC^H^H^H^H^H^HPocketPC comparison list reads just like a comparison of the Newton to the Palm, aside from the color screen. The Newton had all these features, but no one wanted it. People don't buy PDAs for features; they buy them for convenience. Convenience means reliability and speed, along with long battery life.
It's sad that Microsoft hasn't figured this out yet. With their resources, I think they could produce a much *better* PDA than Palm, which hasn't really improved much (well ok, the thin aluminum case is really nice) since the original. Instead, they chose to create one which will beat Palm in the features contest, but lose in the qualities that users care about.
Options aren't just paper either; they're a contract. Saying they're just paper is like saying that cash is just paper. There's more risk in the option contract, but there's risk in cash as well (inflation, or the US govt being overthrown...).
This correction was completely expected. If you didn't expect it, you need to sell your stocks and learn something about economics, and not buy back in until you know more. Most tech stocks doubled in 1999...most for no good reason. There wasn't much that changed financially for most of the companies between 98 and 99, except for investor behavior.
This is the main reason why computing is so cheap to buy. In 1981, an IBM PC cost $5,000 (in 1980 dollars, which is about $9,000 in 2000 dollars). Now a machine substantially more powerful costs $400. All vendors sell the same thing creating so much competition that the price was driven down that much. This is undeniably a great thing for the industry, and for all consumers. If it wasn't for MS, Compaq would be selling PC's with their own OS, Dell would be also, and Gateway would, and they would also have their own value-added features and they would be incompatible.
What proof do you have of that? If it wasn't for MS, perhaps some other company would have a monopoly on PC operating systems. Perhaps companies would join together and support an open operating system. Having this single standard for OSs has been horrible for most industries which use computers. Just take a look at Intel's study, which showed their average support cost per PC to be over $8000/year, or take a look at the various studies which show no net productivity gain from PCs.
While there is a bit of natural monopoly tendency among operating systems, advancement was far more rapid when there were multiple OSs competing for the top of the heap.
I also don't credit the lowered cost in hardware to Microsoft. The competition which creates this lowered costs is due to standards that would have been set whether Microsoft was around or not.
IMO, the best GUI is the "invisible one": once you learn the few basics, you should never spend any time looking at the GUI, just using it.
The best web browser interface I've used is MSIE5 for the Mac. I turn off all of the tool bars. The location bar drops down when i request it. All else is controlled by keyboard commands or programmed mouse buttons.
Zip disks are poor storage for music because of their cost. Because every maker of the cartridges needs to pay Iomega, it's unlikely that the price will drop much.
I'd have to pick OS as the likely entity for real success. They have a huge base, and arguably some of the smartest people in the industry.
The difficulty with the OS is that they would need to raise prices significantly to maintain their proportion of profitability. Currently, Microsoft's main profits are in Office and other monopolyapps, and not in Windows sales. On the Mac, one of the justifications for the free browser is to keep people on the Mac platform (because without a good browser, people will abandon it) so they can maintain their very profitable Office sales on the Mac! (this was posted by the IE5 project manager on the msnews iexplorer5 newsgroup).
With a separate Apps group, a linux version of Office would probably come quickly.
You're missing a large part of how value is estimated, which is earnings growth. MSFT doesn't much to grow in their main income streams (OS and office), since they already dominate the market.
On the other hand, Yahoo and Ebay still have plenty of people to reach, more features to add, and more ways to make money.
A quick look through yahoo's stock research shows that the estimate for earnings growth for 2001 vs 2000:
A simple crude way to estimate valuation for large companies is to compare the long term future earnings growth to the P/E ratio. A properly valued company would have 1 as this value. In comparison, the current S&P 500 is 2.21.
The correct way to calculate value is to look at the assets - debts + all future cash flows, discounted for time. If you have a time machine...
Making fancy cases isn't very interesting to me, but it's pretty apparent that new users are very interested in the flash. And slashdot readers are as well, evidenced by the many threads that have shown up here about custom cases.
Slashdot Mirror
A typical music fan who buys a CD might use that CD at home, take that CD in the car, make a tape of that CD, rip it to their hard drive - or using it as part of a compilation, play that CD with friends and for friends, and keep that CD for many years. That's probably why most consumers, when asked, describe CDs as a good value. At the same time, when asked directly whether CDs cost too much, some consumers will say yes! Why the contradiction? Because some consumers don't understand why the sales tag on a CD is so much higher than the cost of producing the actual physical disc, a cost, which in fact, has decreased over the years.
This is a statement which could be used to point to abuse of monopoly power by the RIAA. There is a false logic being used here, that is, that if the cost of the product is less than I'm willing to pay, then it's fairly priced. That is not how competitive markets work; competitive markets price at a level where excess profit is minimized. By forcing prices above this level, the RIAA demonstrates its monopoly power, pricing at monopoly-revenue-maximizing price rather than free market price, and showing huge excess profits which are still growing.
Monopolies still offer "value" to people; they sell products at prices which are lower than the price at which buyers are willing to pay. However, competitive markets offer much more value (more "profit" for the consumers, less for the corporations, and more overall), and have been shown in theory and practice to be superior.
Apple standardized on MSIE in exchange for a promise for MS to continue development of MS Office for the Mac. Without MS Office, Apple would probably be dead.
I'm not sure what the $100m investment was for, but it has certainly paid off, as it is worth over $300m now.
I for one am quite glad that Lars, Metallica's drummer, is fighting for the rights of artists everywhere to have complete control over their intellectual property: http://www.metallica.com/news/2000/napfaq.html. I believe that his next target should be the Napster-like scourge which has been allowed to propagate for several centuries, the "Public Library".
These "Libraries" take the COPYRIGHTED work of artists and distribute them for FREE to the community, despite having NEVER been given permission to do so. They wrest control of the valuable work out of the hands of the artists; libraries are nothing more than greedy thieves. Why is it okay to get works of literature for free? Why should it be free, when it costs authors time and money to write and publish it? Libraries exist for one reason and one reason only; to pirate literature, nothing more, nothing less. The same people who frequent these Libraries are the same type who frequent Napster--crooked teenagers and college students. Worst of all, who funds this scourge? YOUR VERY OWN GOVERNMENT. Yes, your tax dollars are going to fund this theft of intellectual property.
These "Libraries" will be the DEATH of literature. Metallica must fight for what is right on behalf of the many authors who cannot afford it because so many "Library Patrons" have already stolen their work. I have heard that some of these greedy Library organizations have even expanded their theft into free distribution of music and videos. Who will save our children from this evil?
Fight on, Lars!
In other words, spreading of the email is primarily a user and a client issue, not an OS one. The consequences on the system where the worm is run is an OS issue.
As far as I know, there is no "MacOS X Workstation"; The product currently known as Mac OS X server will be junked when Mac OS X is released. There's no two OS strategy, aside from maintaining OS 9 for legacy machines and applications.
This wouldn't work. You cannot wedge a GUI on to a system which is not designed for that GUI. You could offer a window manager that looked like a Mac (hey, mlvwm!), but a window manager does not a GUI make.
You are either trolling, or are uninformed. From http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4212/ ch4-3.html, a peak in NASA budget was $5.25 billion in 1965. That is $28.5 billion in 2000 dollars.
From http://www.nationalacademies.org/ssb/rapch4.htm, the 1998 NASA budget was 13.64 billion. That is $14.3 billion in 2000 dollars. Furthermore, today's NASA has a much broader range of activities, so the amount actually spent directly towards space flight is even smaller.
The fires aren't at all a surprise; the lab expects them. There are wildfires burning in the area almost every summer. When i was there in the summer of 1998, there were fires on a nearby hill, with smoke reaching the town for several days. In 1996, there was a fire which reached edge of lab property.
Because there is so much preparation for such an event, it's improbable that there will be severe problems. The only issue i know of is that some of the canyons which are burning were used as dumping sites long ago, but the levels of radioactivity are nothing to write home about.
Sure, it's risky. What isn't? What you need to do to make that into a useful statement is to quantify the risk, and compare it to other power generation activities.
Coal mining cuts short the lives of thousands of miners. There are thousands of natural gas explosions every year, yet we have it piped into our houses. Air pollution from fossil fuel burning plants are responsible for the death of over ten thousand people in the US per year. Hydroelectric dams are very dangerous to construct, and occasionally they burst. Furthermore, the risk of global warming due primarily to fossil fuel burning is a tremendously large one for the future.
The primary reason that nuclear power isn't successful in America is its cost.
Being no longer able to rely on a stock price which doubles every year, MSFT won't be able to profit as much from these loopholes. Furthermore, they will probably need to offer either higher salaries or a better options package if they want to retain employees.
What happens when the stock is wounded? Profits fall. What happens when profits fall?
uh-oh.
Yep, Joker.com has worked fine for me as well, although I haven't tried any big changes with the registrations. The best part is that as the Euro falls in value, Joker.com just keeps getting cheaper!
If you don't like the interface, there are hundreds of other quicktime-capable players out there.
However, I'm very impressed at what the video card manufacturers have been able to accomplish. This is how competitive markets should work. Each company pushes the other, lowers prices, raises performance. Some go out of business. Can you imagine how good our spreadsheets could have been if there were still 5-6 competitors instead of a monopoly situation? sigh...
waiting for 300000 cells to calculate
Clearly there is some degree by which people need to have their work protected. If there were no protection, people would have less incentive to produce creative work such as the iMac case. Analagously, we allow patents to have a 17 year monopoly. However, protecting it too broadly leads to ridiculous lawsuits, and restriction of advancement.
The field of IP/Patent/Copyright law deals with this. The goal is to finding the right level of protection which provides the best overall result. In my opinion, this system works better in the US than in any other country.
If you want Jot and digital ink, you can get it for the Palm. It's been available for a long time.
It's sad that Microsoft hasn't figured this out yet. With their resources, I think they could produce a much *better* PDA than Palm, which hasn't really improved much (well ok, the thin aluminum case is really nice) since the original. Instead, they chose to create one which will beat Palm in the features contest, but lose in the qualities that users care about.
If you want features, get a real computer.
This correction was completely expected. If you didn't expect it, you need to sell your stocks and learn something about economics, and not buy back in until you know more. Most tech stocks doubled in 1999...most for no good reason. There wasn't much that changed financially for most of the companies between 98 and 99, except for investor behavior.
What proof do you have of that? If it wasn't for MS, perhaps some other company would have a monopoly on PC operating systems. Perhaps companies would join together and support an open operating system. Having this single standard for OSs has been horrible for most industries which use computers. Just take a look at Intel's study, which showed their average support cost per PC to be over $8000/year, or take a look at the various studies which show no net productivity gain from PCs.
While there is a bit of natural monopoly tendency among operating systems, advancement was far more rapid when there were multiple OSs competing for the top of the heap.
I also don't credit the lowered cost in hardware to Microsoft. The competition which creates this lowered costs is due to standards that would have been set whether Microsoft was around or not.
The best web browser interface I've used is MSIE5 for the Mac. I turn off all of the tool bars. The location bar drops down when i request it. All else is controlled by keyboard commands or programmed mouse buttons.
Did i mention that I hate toolbars?
Zip disks are poor storage for music because of their cost. Because every maker of the cartridges needs to pay Iomega, it's unlikely that the price will drop much.
The difficulty with the OS is that they would need to raise prices significantly to maintain their proportion of profitability. Currently, Microsoft's main profits are in Office and other monopolyapps, and not in Windows sales. On the Mac, one of the justifications for the free browser is to keep people on the Mac platform (because without a good browser, people will abandon it) so they can maintain their very profitable Office sales on the Mac! (this was posted by the IE5 project manager on the msnews iexplorer5 newsgroup).
With a separate Apps group, a linux version of Office would probably come quickly.
You're missing a large part of how value is estimated, which is earnings growth. MSFT doesn't much to grow in their main income streams (OS and office), since they already dominate the market.
On the other hand, Yahoo and Ebay still have plenty of people to reach, more features to add, and more ways to make money.
A quick look through yahoo's stock research shows that the estimate for earnings growth for 2001 vs 2000:
MSFT: 14.47%
AOL: 40.91%
YHOO: 31.83%
EBAY: 82.44%
A simple crude way to estimate valuation for large companies is to compare the long term future earnings growth to the P/E ratio. A properly valued company would have 1 as this value. In comparison, the current S&P 500 is 2.21.
The correct way to calculate value is to look at the assets - debts + all future cash flows, discounted for time. If you have a time machine...
Making fancy cases isn't very interesting to me, but it's pretty apparent that new users are very interested in the flash. And slashdot readers are as well, evidenced by the many threads that have shown up here about custom cases.
Asciimac is quite cool, although a bit unstable (as most hacks written in a few hours are).
:)
I was watching TV in ascii the first time i tried Asciimac. It's actually quite viewable
Interestingly, if you search for "linuxone" on google, no matches are found.
Hmm!