This makes me wonder... If Microsoft really succeeds and the 3 app limit becomes really common, then would it not cause people to try and circumvent it ?
For example you can already watch videos and listen to music over a browser(youtube). You can run excel and word (google apps) over a browser. Why the hell does microsoft want to push people away from local apps onto the internet and towards google ??
Windows Starter Edition = Starter Windows User.
That does not make sense. Acer is capturing marketshare from Dell, Lenovo and HP indicating that atleast a few users are actively switching down from high end laptops to net books. Since many of these users have significant experience with computers, these are the users who are likely to be able to switch to Apple and Ubuntu. Giving them anything less than the best won't stop the attrition.
Then there is the "emerging markets" where the choice is really between pirated windows and crippled windows. I am guessing most will continue to pirate.
That leaves the "first time computer user in developing markets" -- if they have anyone with any sense around them, these people would be convinced to buy Apple (or if they have a geek around, Ubuntu).
Either way, this is a bad move. Why couldn't Microsoft simply make a starter version of Windows by stripping out all eyecandy (no Aero), removing business accesories (no netmeeting, no remote desktop etc.) ? That'd stop this from competing head on with the regular windows.
Skype and AIM are much more popular in many parts of the world than email. Atleast in Europe (Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria from my experience), it is common to print your skype ID on your business card. It allows people to call you relatively cheap (or free). I atleast have one card with no email address, but with skype listed along with phone number.
In true emerging markets it is the same. I have seen immigrants in the US teach their relatives to use skype and yahoochat so that they can make free video calls internationally
Email on the other hand is a hassle since not everyone understands all the scripts properly.
There are countless applications for a computer that don't depend on accuracy, but do depend on speed. For example: gaming, stock analysis
Do you work for Lehman brothers by any chance ?
Offtopic, but it is not very difficult to taste the difference between well water and tap water. Well water tastes slightly muddy. The actual mud in the region and trees/plants around the well change the taste too. Easy way to approximate the taste of well water is to throw in a couple of pieces of mud bricks into the container of water or to store water in a earthen pot.
That said, I can't tell the difference between Evian and tap water.
More importantly, they seem to be collection of information from public sources that legislators can quickly read up. And since they report sources (newspapers, congressional reports etc.) , they sound very fair and balanced.
This is far from secret information, but is a great thing to read when you need background information on policy matters. Also gives an idea what legislators are looking at when they have to vote on items they have no clue about.
Kudos to the guys who wrote this stuff up
Or a whole lot of people who don't use speak English. A lot of people in China,India and Middle East (and most of the east) have difficulty using computers because it involves learning both a new language and a new tool. The biggest problem is the script, which is very different from the regional ones and hence is unfamiliar.
I have seen some of the localized computers, but even then not everything on the screen is fully localized - leading to confusion. Add to that the rarity of using regional keyboards and learning computers becomes a really difficult job
A task based interface, like what HP is doing, is very useful in such situations. Most people can understand the icons and once the program starts running, most people can figure out what to do.
Don't drag history into this. The west as we know it did not exist prior to the 15th-18th century (Renaissance, Discovery of Americas)
I have talked to Iranian students who were studying abroad and from what they say Iran's current problems with the US have to do with the US support for the Shah and the post-revolution isolation of Iran. They don't all treat USA as the "great Satan" even if the official position is that.
They are in a bad neighbourhood, with Iraq on one side and afghanistan on the other (both have US bases and general lawlessness). And they also have Pakistan with its Islamic nukes, which really is Sunni nukes with Iran being Shia. They are afraid of all these and might very well nuclearize. What they really think of Israel is anybody's guess.
Remember that China and US did not talk prior to the Ping-Pong diplomacy situation, but that did not stop it from becoming US's biggest trading partner is less than 30 years.
Yeah I agree, everyone has a nice single-word easy to pronounce name except one. So China must be the odd one out. Who names a satellite "Dong Fang Hong 1" anyway?
What next ? Playboy employees getting jailed in $MIDDLE_EASTERN_COMPANY ? What about anyone who uploaded racy pictures of themselves on the internet ? After all this could corrupt the morally pious people in the rest of the world!! Bahrain is a common stop over on flights to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand etc. - So would you consider it fair for vacationing Americans to get arrested on flights through the country ?
Not that I think Bahrain will ever do it - Whenever I stopped there, I found the airport employees to be friendly and ready to help (even if not exactly the best informed), But they do have laws on the books if they ever needed to arrest anyone in USA.
We've seen what the USSR could accomplish as a go-it-alone economy, and it wasn't enough. Having a nominally capitalist system will help, but Putin needs to stop with the saber rattling and the blind nationalism.
We have so far seen what a large communist economy can accomplish in USSR. We have seen what a minimally capitalist Russia can do. But from the way Putin has been moving, he is not planning to stop there. It seems like he wants to be a monopoly player in any sector Russia has the power to do it. He is playing a game of chess with eastern Europe as his chessboard when it comes to oil pipelines. Attacking Georgia was a case of sacrificing a pawn to make a move on the queen - The BTC pipeline is the pipeline that will break Russia's monopoly on gas and Russia just made a move on it.
The same thing goes for any natural resources, Aluminium to Manganese -- Russia lets the oligarchs consolidate the industry with no regards to monopoly issues and at the last minute captures them back from them (or gets enough power to control the exports). You can't fault Russia for lack of extreme capitalism.
That said, it works for natural resources, but lack of protection for entrepreneurs has been a disaster in all other fields. Their productivity is actually falling in most sectors and they have been able to export limited number of branded products. If I were Putin, I would have asked for help in developing entrepreneurial culture,
You can do all of that, but still the cost of the screen has to exceed $10. A 51 inch LCD TV retails for $1500. Now if you use a 5 inch screen, the cost would be $15 ($1500/100). That is not including any of the peripheral costs.
Add to this the fact that India does not have a decent fab facility - It seems like US, Germany and China/Taiwan are the only countries which could Fab any new CPU for this product and we have not heard anything from them.
Actually that is only partially correct. FM underwrote loans and then resold them to whoever wanted to buy them. So if the loans that FM thought was conforming defaulted, FM was liable to pay them. FM is a state backed institution, so everyone trusted them and bought everything they signed. The CXO's of FM had their payments linked to how big their loan portfolio was. See how easily the system can go wrong ?
When in doubt, always follow the incentives...
My opinion is that the real reason is economic and not intelligence
take a simple model where each product is made from 2 items , capital and labor . US has a well developed industrial sector - which means that capital is abundant, but labor is not. This causes cost of labor to go up.But then people migrate in to the country, there is capital outflow from US as investment in the rest of the world, US buys stuff from outside etc. This causes the cost of labor to fall relative to capital. On the other hand in Japan, they are extremely insular. They refuse to let immigrants in, the language is a barrier, and they have cultural ideas about what is allowed and what is not (for example they still produce their own rice, even though it is much more expensive than importing it). All of this causes the cost of labor in Japan to be waaay higher than what it is in the US.
This causes Japanese to automate all sorts of stuff since workforce is costly. This is the real reason why Japanese have all the cool technology and why Japanese work so darn long hours. They are the world leader in robotics, they have vending machines for everything and they have the coolest cellphones -- all because replacing these tech with people would be more expensive for the people.
If your TV was as relatively cheap (compared to one workhour of wages) then you'd be upgrading your TV every month too.
The government does not see the flags when Madoff claims to his clients that he is trading so much. On the other hand, when somebody files a complain and the guy is in jail, even the stupidest of investigators can find out where the money went.
Similarly, after the charges have been bought to court, it is easy to trace the shell companies that these firms transfer the money to. Accounting in USA is not so bad that cash can be falsified - only the Mafia has done that before and they have mostly been shut down.
They've taken all of the advantages that American society offered while contributing as little as possible in return
US benefits by getting the cheapest possible computers.
I think the parent is trying to say that the injury from his boxing may have caused his symptoms.I have heard similar stories about soccer players who head the ball a lot.
it comes from our favorite enemy
Microsoft research is really not part of the Borg - they seem to make very in-the-sky type of software and does some OS research.
India in the past has limited corporate fraud. It has usually been much more open power grabs or cash grabs by the promoters of the company -- but they were never secret. They were more like Boone Pickens operations in the US in the 80's.
As a result (or just laziness) the reporting standards in India are lax even compared to pre-Enron USA. You can fit in a whole quarterly report in less than 10 pages ( here for example ).
This fraud by Satyam is the perfect storm - it involves largely foreign held company, it is dual listed on NASDAQ and involves undeniable fraud and falsification. I hope this provides an impetus for India to adopt something like Sarbanes-Oxley.
And about PWC messing this one up, they have been involved in all sort of corporate frauds on both the good and the bad side. Look up the fight for Gazprom in Russia between Britishers the Russian stockholders -- Britishers hated PWC in that case. (or for a case where russians think PWC is bad look up TNK http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-53194732.html). I don't think PWC is unable to do its job -- just that they are too big and that ones in a while they have a few bad apples.
I agree that it is very difficult to implement any of them without controversy, which is exactly why I give credit (or benefit of doubt) to Obama on this one. There is this management theory that a new CEO can fire anyone he wants within the first 90 days and no one will question that decision. The way Obama seems to be doing it is this -He announces all the detention centers will be closed, without saying how. That immediately re frames the problem of whether to close them or not into one of how to close them. The "how" part is now the problem of bureaucrats who are more competent at this than Obama.
If he had waited a couple of months, then people would have pressured him not to take the tough decisions, similarly the cicumstances would have changed in 3 months.
I don't see why the H1B workers would stick around once they have been laid off. Their Visa will not allow them to legally resume employment after the first company lays them off - so staying back beyond the specified time period is pointless.
These guys are mainly programmers, so it is not like they are going to work at the nearest construction site with no prospects of legal employment in the future, is it ?
Nitpick
China did not buy much of mortgage backed securities - they did not need to, since most of banking and social security out there is government controlled. The gulf investors did buy tons of it though
On the other hand China did buy trillions of government debt from US. This allowed them to export tons of stuff into US while keeping a fixed exchange rate. And before you go Caveat Emptoring them, remember that they have not yet played their hands -- they could always dump that debt back on the market at any time.
And about "economies being separated the way they should be " - such strict separation only leads to eternal poverty for poor countries and slow decay for the rich. Japan may be the only country in the world to develop in relative isolation (not after 1945, but their first industrialisation).
Slashdot Mirror
This makes me wonder... If Microsoft really succeeds and the 3 app limit becomes really common, then would it not cause people to try and circumvent it ?
For example you can already watch videos and listen to music over a browser(youtube). You can run excel and word (google apps) over a browser. Why the hell does microsoft want to push people away from local apps onto the internet and towards google ??
Windows Starter Edition = Starter Windows User.
That does not make sense. Acer is capturing marketshare from Dell, Lenovo and HP indicating that atleast a few users are actively switching down from high end laptops to net books. Since many of these users have significant experience with computers, these are the users who are likely to be able to switch to Apple and Ubuntu. Giving them anything less than the best won't stop the attrition.
Then there is the "emerging markets" where the choice is really between pirated windows and crippled windows. I am guessing most will continue to pirate.
That leaves the "first time computer user in developing markets" -- if they have anyone with any sense around them, these people would be convinced to buy Apple (or if they have a geek around, Ubuntu).
Either way, this is a bad move. Why couldn't Microsoft simply make a starter version of Windows by stripping out all eyecandy (no Aero), removing business accesories (no netmeeting, no remote desktop etc.) ? That'd stop this from competing head on with the regular windows.
Skype and AIM are much more popular in many parts of the world than email. Atleast in Europe (Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria from my experience), it is common to print your skype ID on your business card. It allows people to call you relatively cheap (or free). I atleast have one card with no email address, but with skype listed along with phone number.
In true emerging markets it is the same. I have seen immigrants in the US teach their relatives to use skype and yahoochat so that they can make free video calls internationally
Email on the other hand is a hassle since not everyone understands all the scripts properly.
There are countless applications for a computer that don't depend on accuracy, but do depend on speed. For example: gaming, stock analysis
Do you work for Lehman brothers by any chance ?
Offtopic, but it is not very difficult to taste the difference between well water and tap water. Well water tastes slightly muddy. The actual mud in the region and trees/plants around the well change the taste too. Easy way to approximate the taste of well water is to throw in a couple of pieces of mud bricks into the container of water or to store water in a earthen pot.
That said, I can't tell the difference between Evian and tap water.
More importantly, they seem to be collection of information from public sources that legislators can quickly read up. And since they report sources (newspapers, congressional reports etc.) , they sound very fair and balanced.
This is far from secret information, but is a great thing to read when you need background information on policy matters. Also gives an idea what legislators are looking at when they have to vote on items they have no clue about.
Kudos to the guys who wrote this stuff up
Why?
I believe a man should be allowed to drink his scotch anywhere he likes - drinking on the desktop or kitchen table does not a pervert make!!
Or a whole lot of people who don't use speak English. A lot of people in China,India and Middle East (and most of the east) have difficulty using computers because it involves learning both a new language and a new tool. The biggest problem is the script, which is very different from the regional ones and hence is unfamiliar.
I have seen some of the localized computers, but even then not everything on the screen is fully localized - leading to confusion. Add to that the rarity of using regional keyboards and learning computers becomes a really difficult job
A task based interface, like what HP is doing, is very useful in such situations. Most people can understand the icons and once the program starts running, most people can figure out what to do.
Don't drag history into this. The west as we know it did not exist prior to the 15th-18th century (Renaissance, Discovery of Americas)
I have talked to Iranian students who were studying abroad and from what they say Iran's current problems with the US have to do with the US support for the Shah and the post-revolution isolation of Iran. They don't all treat USA as the "great Satan" even if the official position is that.
They are in a bad neighbourhood, with Iraq on one side and afghanistan on the other (both have US bases and general lawlessness). And they also have Pakistan with its Islamic nukes, which really is Sunni nukes with Iran being Shia. They are afraid of all these and might very well nuclearize. What they really think of Israel is anybody's guess.
Remember that China and US did not talk prior to the Ping-Pong diplomacy situation, but that did not stop it from becoming US's biggest trading partner is less than 30 years.
Yeah I agree, everyone has a nice single-word easy to pronounce name except one. So China must be the odd one out. Who names a satellite "Dong Fang Hong 1" anyway?
Like whoever posted this video ?
What next ? Playboy employees getting jailed in $MIDDLE_EASTERN_COMPANY ? What about anyone who uploaded racy pictures of themselves on the internet ? After all this could corrupt the morally pious people in the rest of the world!! Bahrain is a common stop over on flights to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand etc. - So would you consider it fair for vacationing Americans to get arrested on flights through the country ?
Not that I think Bahrain will ever do it - Whenever I stopped there, I found the airport employees to be friendly and ready to help (even if not exactly the best informed), But they do have laws on the books if they ever needed to arrest anyone in USA.
We've seen what the USSR could accomplish as a go-it-alone economy, and it wasn't enough. Having a nominally capitalist system will help, but Putin needs to stop with the saber rattling and the blind nationalism.
We have so far seen what a large communist economy can accomplish in USSR. We have seen what a minimally capitalist Russia can do. But from the way Putin has been moving, he is not planning to stop there. It seems like he wants to be a monopoly player in any sector Russia has the power to do it. He is playing a game of chess with eastern Europe as his chessboard when it comes to oil pipelines. Attacking Georgia was a case of sacrificing a pawn to make a move on the queen - The BTC pipeline is the pipeline that will break Russia's monopoly on gas and Russia just made a move on it.
The same thing goes for any natural resources, Aluminium to Manganese -- Russia lets the oligarchs consolidate the industry with no regards to monopoly issues and at the last minute captures them back from them (or gets enough power to control the exports). You can't fault Russia for lack of extreme capitalism.
That said, it works for natural resources, but lack of protection for entrepreneurs has been a disaster in all other fields. Their productivity is actually falling in most sectors and they have been able to export limited number of branded products. If I were Putin, I would have asked for help in developing entrepreneurial culture,
You can do all of that, but still the cost of the screen has to exceed $10. A 51 inch LCD TV retails for $1500. Now if you use a 5 inch screen, the cost would be $15 ($1500/100). That is not including any of the peripheral costs.
Add to this the fact that India does not have a decent fab facility - It seems like US, Germany and China/Taiwan are the only countries which could Fab any new CPU for this product and we have not heard anything from them.
Actually that is only partially correct. FM underwrote loans and then resold them to whoever wanted to buy them. So if the loans that FM thought was conforming defaulted, FM was liable to pay them. FM is a state backed institution, so everyone trusted them and bought everything they signed. The CXO's of FM had their payments linked to how big their loan portfolio was. See how easily the system can go wrong ?
When in doubt, always follow the incentives...
My opinion is that the real reason is economic and not intelligence
take a simple model where each product is made from 2 items , capital and labor . US has a well developed industrial sector - which means that capital is abundant, but labor is not. This causes cost of labor to go up.But then people migrate in to the country, there is capital outflow from US as investment in the rest of the world, US buys stuff from outside etc. This causes the cost of labor to fall relative to capital. On the other hand in Japan, they are extremely insular. They refuse to let immigrants in, the language is a barrier, and they have cultural ideas about what is allowed and what is not (for example they still produce their own rice, even though it is much more expensive than importing it). All of this causes the cost of labor in Japan to be waaay higher than what it is in the US.
This causes Japanese to automate all sorts of stuff since workforce is costly. This is the real reason why Japanese have all the cool technology and why Japanese work so darn long hours. They are the world leader in robotics, they have vending machines for everything and they have the coolest cellphones -- all because replacing these tech with people would be more expensive for the people.
If your TV was as relatively cheap (compared to one workhour of wages) then you'd be upgrading your TV every month too.
The government does not see the flags when Madoff claims to his clients that he is trading so much. On the other hand, when somebody files a complain and the guy is in jail, even the stupidest of investigators can find out where the money went.
Similarly, after the charges have been bought to court, it is easy to trace the shell companies that these firms transfer the money to. Accounting in USA is not so bad that cash can be falsified - only the Mafia has done that before and they have mostly been shut down.
They've taken all of the advantages that American society offered while contributing as little as possible in return
US benefits by getting the cheapest possible computers.
I think the parent is trying to say that the injury from his boxing may have caused his symptoms.I have heard similar stories about soccer players who head the ball a lot.
it comes from our favorite enemy
Microsoft research is really not part of the Borg - they seem to make very in-the-sky type of software and does some OS research.
India in the past has limited corporate fraud. It has usually been much more open power grabs or cash grabs by the promoters of the company -- but they were never secret. They were more like Boone Pickens operations in the US in the 80's.
As a result (or just laziness) the reporting standards in India are lax even compared to pre-Enron USA. You can fit in a whole quarterly report in less than 10 pages ( here for example ).
This fraud by Satyam is the perfect storm - it involves largely foreign held company, it is dual listed on NASDAQ and involves undeniable fraud and falsification. I hope this provides an impetus for India to adopt something like Sarbanes-Oxley.
And about PWC messing this one up, they have been involved in all sort of corporate frauds on both the good and the bad side. Look up the fight for Gazprom in Russia between Britishers the Russian stockholders -- Britishers hated PWC in that case. (or for a case where russians think PWC is bad look up TNK http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-53194732.html). I don't think PWC is unable to do its job -- just that they are too big and that ones in a while they have a few bad apples.
I agree that it is very difficult to implement any of them without controversy, which is exactly why I give credit (or benefit of doubt) to Obama on this one.
There is this management theory that a new CEO can fire anyone he wants within the first 90 days and no one will question that decision. The way Obama seems to be doing it is this -He announces all the detention centers will be closed, without saying how. That immediately re frames the problem of whether to close them or not into one of how to close them. The "how" part is now the problem of bureaucrats who are more competent at this than Obama.
If he had waited a couple of months, then people would have pressured him not to take the tough decisions, similarly the cicumstances would have changed in 3 months.
I don't see why the H1B workers would stick around once they have been laid off. Their Visa will not allow them to legally resume employment after the first company lays them off - so staying back beyond the specified time period is pointless.
These guys are mainly programmers, so it is not like they are going to work at the nearest construction site with no prospects of legal employment in the future, is it ?
Nitpick
China did not buy much of mortgage backed securities - they did not need to, since most of banking and social security out there is government controlled. The gulf investors did buy tons of it though
On the other hand China did buy trillions of government debt from US. This allowed them to export tons of stuff into US while keeping a fixed exchange rate. And before you go Caveat Emptoring them, remember that they have not yet played their hands -- they could always dump that debt back on the market at any time.
And about "economies being separated the way they should be " - such strict separation only leads to eternal poverty for poor countries and slow decay for the rich. Japan may be the only country in the world to develop in relative isolation (not after 1945, but their first industrialisation).
Interestingly, Yahoo finance front page is right now linking to the same page on All things digital for the email contents.