And finally, they are very unreliable. In particular, balls sometimes break in the chamber or the barrel as you are firing. If you're just shooting paint this results in a mess and your gun jamming. If you're firing tear gas this could get pretty unpleasant.
I raised that issue in my initial posting. In order for it to be a more effective weapon it would require 6" diameter accuracy at a range of 100 yards and have to deliver a cyclic rate of at least 3 rounds per second.
That's why I thought loading the irritant projectile in a typical firearm-style cartridge would help a lot. Most of the paintball firing problems I had related to misfeeds, which I attributed to feeding the "naked" projectile and cheap and overly simple feed mechanisms. Protecting the projectile in a rigid casing would prevent crushing on a misfeed, and allow for a spring or other force feed mechanism, and allow the use of something other than CO2 as a propellant.
The biggest challenge would remain the projectile membrane, as you need to walk the line between tough enough to hit ~500fps without breaking a projectile in the barrel but soft enough to break on impact without bouncing.
Dunno why paintball accuracy sucks -- smooth bores? Too-soft casings flexing in flight? Inertial problems because of the liquid? Low muzzle velocity? I'd imagine they all contribute, but again it doesn't have to be a 500 yard sniper weapon. Hitting a 6" circle reliably at 100 yards from a long-barrelled weapon would be more than adequate, and I don't think even that it would get used that way. It'd be a burst or automatic weapon used to spray at smaller crowds, or in bursts of 3-5 rounds at individuals.
A dozen guys with M16-type rifles could deliver a lot of irritant in a small amount of time. And it's not supposed to be just the irritant, it's supposed to hurt too.
Maybe I just haven't thought about it enough, but why not pepper-spray paintball guns for riot control or other situations where you just want to incapacitate? You'd get decent physical range, with an automatic firing version excellent coverage.
Regular mace or pepper spray requires you to be too close, "tear gas" or whatever they shoot in a gasseous cloud is too broad and not specific enough.
Paintballs hurt like a sonofabitch, a repeater could deliver a lot of them at a good distance to clothes, faces, hair, etc, adding some longer-term deterrant effect as well (have to change clothes).
From my experience, though, you'd have to "fix" the firing mechanism, since jams and fuckups with a tear-gas paintball would be a bit more than just an inconvenience. I'd make the paintball payloads more like conventional bullets, cased in a plastic cartridge. This'd solve a lot of feed issues as well as allow for more traditional box magazines. I'd also use conventional gunpowder propellant for higher velocities, larger payloads than CO2 can deliver.
It might actually be possible to make a paintball cartridge a standard weapon could use.
Of course the magic part is probably whatever membrane you use for the irritant payload. It has to be strong enough for firing and to really hurt on impact, but it also has to be soft enough to break on softer surfaces as well as not cause soft-tissue injuries other than bruising.
A weapon like this would really seem to be a natural, especially in situations where you want to deliver a lot of firepower in civilian environments -- think of defending an Embassy with this --.50s in the windows, guards with M-16s, all putting out 100s of rounds a minute of a chemical irritant instead of lethal bullets, risking a military conflict..
It'd probably be collusion, but where would Microsoft be without AMD and Intel? If AMD and Intel met in some dark alley one night and agreed that they were not going to support Palladium in their CPUs what would MS do?
On a side note, just about everyone has pirate broadcast equipment sitting around their house, but doesn't know it. You can take your VCR and hook up an antenna to your video-out co-ax connection (instead of a piece of coax cable into the back of your TV) and bango! You're boradcasting at an incredible.75 watt to channel 3 or 4 of all the TV's in the vicinity. What fun.
In the early 80s my dad's business bought an early Quasar VCR (the videotape deck was portable and seperate from the tuner/timer portion) and a Panasonic color camera as a tax writeoff. We had loads of fun with the dubbing cable, a boombox, the camera, a tennis racket and a selection of obnoxious hard rock music making our own music videos.
Somewhere in the manual was a "Do Not" pictograph showing you not to hook the tv out jack to your antenna with "FCC warning" or something written near it. Needless to say, this is all the encouragement we needed to actually do it.
We put on our best music videos -- me jumping around with a tennis racket to "Whole Lotta Rosie" -- a very time-consumingly shot video of matchbox cars smashing into legos and wood blocks, and other cinema verite and then went to all the neighborhood houses we could get into to see what fabulous programming could be found on Channel 3.
Nothing. Not even a faint signal. No audio, no video, zilch. We had the tallest house in our 5-house Nielsen sample, and a big antenna on the peak of the roof and not even our next door neighbors could get the signal.
Anyway, maybe it was just our VCR but I don't think you really can broadcast with a VCR.
Of course it doesn't hurt. There's only one key, to his mom's garage. With all the money spent on hot gadgets, he can't afford anything else like a house or car that requires a key.
3.11 was really stable, but it wasn't terribly scalable in terms of the users database. NDS, introduced in 4.x, made it an amazing, seamless enterprise file-print platform. Novell to this day still has the best filesystem ACLs. I learned Novell's first and I was pretty much amazed that anything as bad as UNIX and NT ACLs were even usable by anyone.
My gut feeling is that Novell should have dropped Netware-the-OS and instead ported Netware-file-print-services as a userspace application that could be run on more capable multipurpose operating systems, much the same way of Samba.
What killed Netware wasn't that it didn't do its primary purpose (file-print) better than anything else, but that it was a *horrible* operating system -- 4.xx relied on cooperative multitasking, had no protected memory and couldn't host applications very well and was hard to develop for. The 90s brought a huge surge for quickly written or ported apps that could be bolted onto "the server" -- Netware had few apps and those it had often ran poorly.
Places that would have kept NW file/print but didn't because they needed a more flexible OS could have migrated to a unix flavor and kept running a netware file/print.
[I'll go out on a limb and presume some of the following, none of which may be true now but much of which may be true in the future.]
4.) The null route stays in place as long as necessary, currently indefinitely.
Indefinitely is a long time. Let's say that the IP is part of a Tier 4 providers CIDR/19. Let's further say that they got that/19 from their parent provider's/16.
The reason you could run a KP site on the original tier 4 provider's network is that they're damn near out of business and nobody cared about AUPs or about much of anything. The KP site kills the business, and the provider's/19 goes back to the Tier 3 provider.
They re-slice it into/24s or whatever. Now, I go to use my new/24 at my new provider and my router, running the blocked IP, can't talk to anything. Anyway, indefinitely is a long time -- is there any way to overcome it? Does anybody periodically check it? I'd hate to think that there's a bunch of null0 routes in some backbone router that nobody can remember why they're there...
You're right, doing anything that looks halfway professional with computer-based video isn't cheap or easy.
But do most people care? Considering that they can barely edit at all with a tape-based medium and that most home movies I've seen have a good 4-5 minutes of an extreme close-up of some guy's crotch and "IS THIS FUCKING THING ON?!?!?!?!?!" coming over the speakers, I'd bet that just being able to snip shit out and stick it straight on DVD without the animated, made-in-hollywood DVD menuing is good enough for most people.
As the other posters have indicated, there are emulators for 'other' platforms that can do this.
What'd be interesting would be a purpose-built commercial emulator that could do this, hook up to a TV and play actual ROM carts from all those systems.
With the right licensing, I'm sure that Sega and Nintendo and especially older (Atari, etc) vendors wouldn't care, especially if it was designed to use legit media (ROM carts or official CDs). They're not making money selling the hardware, and they can only make money selling paid-for software again (presuming the device has a CD player or something they can supply old games on in a media format cheaper than making rom carts).
The only objection I could imagine would be a small fear that "the retrostation" would canibalize sales from new hardware, but even that's iffy, since people that want to play the old games are probably dedicated enough to own *new* consoles and people that own none want the newer systems (PS2, Xbox, gamecube, etc).
The bummer is that the hardware would probably be too expensive (since it'd probably be a cut-down PC inside).
The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.
For a lot of people it *does* appear to be faster, but it's not just simple CPU speed. If the average CPU updater is creaking along on a 1st or even 2nd generation PII (233-450Mhz) system, chances are they also have little RAM (as little as 32MB), a much slower memory bus (66Mhz on 1st gen PIIs) and slow disk drive, a weak video card and a creaky OS and browser
When you move up to a contemporary machine you end up with a better Windows (2K and XP are superior to 95 and 98) running a newer browser, more RAM which reduces swapping, and when swapping DOES happen it happens to a faster disk at ATA-66 or even ATA-100 speeds with little fragmentation.
All this does add up to a browsing experience that seems faster to most people. The cognescenti realize that its just a better machine and that the internet pipe is no better, but to the other 99.5% of the computer-using population the internet got faster..
Re:Interesting...Private Media's Stock Soared
on
The Porn Of Napster
·
· Score: 2
Hard to see where the gain comes from. Their stock has underpeformed the NASDAQ and the S&P by something on the order of 45% in the past year and is off nearly 70% from a year ago.
I think there's a lot of money changing hands in the porn industry, but I can't believe that outside of a few niche players (Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, some video companies) that there's this massive, platinum-plated industry out there. I think there's a lot of places just breaking even, and an awful lot of organized crime skimming going on.
I've had long contact with Groupware systems (have installed and run Exchange & Groupwise systems for several years), and I'm always amazed at why someone hasn't managed to take the IMAP standard and extend it so that it's simpler to interface with more vanilla clients or lower-end clients.
Basically even the "full" client would talk IMAP to the server and then render the data to whatever GUI calendaring/scheduling stuff it would want. The advantage is that vanilla text IMAP clients could still enumerate a folder and read non-mail data as messages, and perhaps even send mail messages that could be interpreted by the server as non-mail items (appointment, tasks, etc).
Exchange's IMAP functionality kind of does this, but calendar items don't show up as anything more than URLs to the Exchange web client.
That's all well and good in a philosophical perspective, but there's a here-and-now, why would you sell tools that help limit freedom to people that are willing to drive tanks over their own citizens?
Why would you be willing to sell them ANYTHING? A lot of stink has been made over buying "blood" diamonds from Sierra Leone and Angola -- why shouldn't the money Cisco made from China be seen as "blood money"?
That's because fucking capitalists have only commerce as a value. They don't really care about freedom or democracy except as defined by the ability to buy elected officials.
Boeing sold missle technology to the Chinese, too. If the AK-47 wasn't such a great rifle, I'd bet that Colt would sell them M-16s too.
Wasn't it Kruschev who said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope they'd hang them with?
You're not kidding. I start reading stuff like this and I start wondering if its not too late to go analog and give up on computers and do something else.
I mean, once they hammer all the fun out of it by making it like cable TV what's the fucking point?
Microsoft's ability to manipulate hardware vendors was really great when there were dozens of vendors and the threat of being cut off from Windows was a meaningful threat to vendors PC business.
The big hardware markets have change dramatically; HP, Dell, and IBM. I just cannot imagine that Microsoft would be will to try brinksmanship with their number one customer.
It's also an empty threat in many cases as business customers often have Select or Enterprise Agreements that can provide them with Windows. They'd likely be THRILLED to buy naked Compaq desktops at a steep discount from HP that they could put their already-acquired MS software onto.
Secondly, MS would lose a major revenue stream which would nail their profits hard and probably introduce MSFT stock to a new price floor, which kills employee pay and benefits.
Thirdly, it would only STRENGTHEN the bargaining position of the remaining PC hardware vendors.
Plus, the idea of pissing off the two remaining HW vendors enough that they stop giving MS a percentage of every PC they make, pick another OS to distribute and generally dump MS has got to make MS really, really scared...
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
I don't get it. If I moved from n to 1 on the list of a vendor's customers, why wouldn't I see increased leverage with my vendor? The story implies that being the number one customer of Microsoft is tantamount to losing leverage ("more dependant")?
It's a semantic argument to be sure, but regardless of what Bruce said about Microsoft you would think that they wouldn't want to damage their reputation with their number one customer, would you?
Or is this all about MS playing Dell and HP off each other?
Re:One Question....
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Funyuns rock. I have a hard time understanding why they still make them, since I'm the only person I know that likes them and eats them with any regularity.
4K workers is a lot, especially if they're at a single at a small enough number of sites to have over 1k employees per site.
You'd think in that situation that there would be enough turnover or risk to hire somebody with a security background to monitor the security systems (alarms, cameras, card-key systems).
And a lot of places sell or work with valuable, high risk or dangerous materials (weapons, drugs, precious metals & gems, chemicals, radioactive materials, etc). I'd imagine that insurance would demand a more rigorous security situation than property-management supplied "security" (which really are nothing more than rent-a-suits).
Although even for plain-old big buildings, what kind of security do you *want* other than security guards (and the usual card-access systems and cameras)? Ex-Mossad guys with MP5s, German Shepherds and "interrogation" rooms?
Maybe I'm just security unaware, but it strikes me that you can take a long walk down a paranoid road for little purpose...
For years, Apple ignored the game market, as they wanted the Mac to be a "serious" computer, and games where seen to be secondary/tertiary to business/educational use.
Which is why they named and colored a whole line of them like fruit?
No, I just based it upon the number of third party campaigns I've seen totally tank and the overwhelming number of libertarian party campaigns that go nowhere.
As for facts specific to this particular situation, the last libertarian candidate got less than 9% of the vote. This leads me to believe that libertarian politics are weak and aren't really a big draw.
Even a recent News-Record column said that "success" for Grubb in this particular race would be 25% of the vote. This just demonstrates that she's a here-and-now, single-issue candidate who doesn't have any real backing or substance.
If you want you can cry now over her loss and move on and find something else to cry about later on, or you can keep investing false hope in a non-solution and be REALLY disappointed when she's back to temping at the mall.
If you think backing the libertarian candidate is the way to victory, you're lost.
I agree with the theoretical notion that if we all got involved we could elect better and even third party candidates, but the libertarian party isn't going to have enough appeal to most voters and will actually turn off many voters.
Slashdot Mirror
And finally, they are very unreliable. In particular, balls sometimes break in the chamber or the barrel as you are firing. If you're just shooting paint this results in a mess and your gun jamming. If you're firing tear gas this could get pretty unpleasant.
I raised that issue in my initial posting. In order for it to be a more effective weapon it would require 6" diameter accuracy at a range of 100 yards and have to deliver a cyclic rate of at least 3 rounds per second.
That's why I thought loading the irritant projectile in a typical firearm-style cartridge would help a lot. Most of the paintball firing problems I had related to misfeeds, which I attributed to feeding the "naked" projectile and cheap and overly simple feed mechanisms. Protecting the projectile in a rigid casing would prevent crushing on a misfeed, and allow for a spring or other force feed mechanism, and allow the use of something other than CO2 as a propellant.
The biggest challenge would remain the projectile membrane, as you need to walk the line between tough enough to hit ~500fps without breaking a projectile in the barrel but soft enough to break on impact without bouncing.
Dunno why paintball accuracy sucks -- smooth bores? Too-soft casings flexing in flight? Inertial problems because of the liquid? Low muzzle velocity? I'd imagine they all contribute, but again it doesn't have to be a 500 yard sniper weapon. Hitting a 6" circle reliably at 100 yards from a long-barrelled weapon would be more than adequate, and I don't think even that it would get used that way. It'd be a burst or automatic weapon used to spray at smaller crowds, or in bursts of 3-5 rounds at individuals.
A dozen guys with M16-type rifles could deliver a lot of irritant in a small amount of time. And it's not supposed to be just the irritant, it's supposed to hurt too.
Maybe I just haven't thought about it enough, but why not pepper-spray paintball guns for riot control or other situations where you just want to incapacitate? You'd get decent physical range, with an automatic firing version excellent coverage.
.50s in the windows, guards with M-16s, all putting out 100s of rounds a minute of a chemical irritant instead of lethal bullets, risking a military conflict..
Regular mace or pepper spray requires you to be too close, "tear gas" or whatever they shoot in a gasseous cloud is too broad and not specific enough.
Paintballs hurt like a sonofabitch, a repeater could deliver a lot of them at a good distance to clothes, faces, hair, etc, adding some longer-term deterrant effect as well (have to change clothes).
From my experience, though, you'd have to "fix" the firing mechanism, since jams and fuckups with a tear-gas paintball would be a bit more than just an inconvenience. I'd make the paintball payloads more like conventional bullets, cased in a plastic cartridge. This'd solve a lot of feed issues as well as allow for more traditional box magazines. I'd also use conventional gunpowder propellant for higher velocities, larger payloads than CO2 can deliver.
It might actually be possible to make a paintball cartridge a standard weapon could use.
Of course the magic part is probably whatever membrane you use for the irritant payload. It has to be strong enough for firing and to really hurt on impact, but it also has to be soft enough to break on softer surfaces as well as not cause soft-tissue injuries other than bruising.
A weapon like this would really seem to be a natural, especially in situations where you want to deliver a lot of firepower in civilian environments -- think of defending an Embassy with this --
Anyway, why haven't they done this yet?
It'd probably be collusion, but where would Microsoft be without AMD and Intel? If AMD and Intel met in some dark alley one night and agreed that they were not going to support Palladium in their CPUs what would MS do?
On a side note, just about everyone has pirate broadcast equipment sitting around their house, but doesn't know it. You can take your VCR and hook up an antenna to your video-out co-ax connection (instead of a piece of coax cable into the back of your TV) and bango! You're boradcasting at an incredible .75 watt to channel 3 or 4 of all the TV's in the vicinity. What fun.
In the early 80s my dad's business bought an early Quasar VCR (the videotape deck was portable and seperate from the tuner/timer portion) and a Panasonic color camera as a tax writeoff. We had loads of fun with the dubbing cable, a boombox, the camera, a tennis racket and a selection of obnoxious hard rock music making our own music videos.
Somewhere in the manual was a "Do Not" pictograph showing you not to hook the tv out jack to your antenna with "FCC warning" or something written near it. Needless to say, this is all the encouragement we needed to actually do it.
We put on our best music videos -- me jumping around with a tennis racket to "Whole Lotta Rosie" -- a very time-consumingly shot video of matchbox cars smashing into legos and wood blocks, and other cinema verite and then went to all the neighborhood houses we could get into to see what fabulous programming could be found on Channel 3.
Nothing. Not even a faint signal. No audio, no video, zilch. We had the tallest house in our 5-house Nielsen sample, and a big antenna on the peak of the roof and not even our next door neighbors could get the signal.
Anyway, maybe it was just our VCR but I don't think you really can broadcast with a VCR.
Of course it doesn't hurt. There's only one key, to his mom's garage. With all the money spent on hot gadgets, he can't afford anything else like a house or car that requires a key.
With the rub being that some of the worst offenders *cough*Groupwise*cough* were Novell-sourced NLMs...
3.11 was really stable, but it wasn't terribly scalable in terms of the users database. NDS, introduced in 4.x, made it an amazing, seamless enterprise file-print platform. Novell to this day still has the best filesystem ACLs. I learned Novell's first and I was pretty much amazed that anything as bad as UNIX and NT ACLs were even usable by anyone.
My gut feeling is that Novell should have dropped Netware-the-OS and instead ported Netware-file-print-services as a userspace application that could be run on more capable multipurpose operating systems, much the same way of Samba.
What killed Netware wasn't that it didn't do its primary purpose (file-print) better than anything else, but that it was a *horrible* operating system -- 4.xx relied on cooperative multitasking, had no protected memory and couldn't host applications very well and was hard to develop for. The 90s brought a huge surge for quickly written or ported apps that could be bolted onto "the server" -- Netware had few apps and those it had often ran poorly.
Places that would have kept NW file/print but didn't because they needed a more flexible OS could have migrated to a unix flavor and kept running a netware file/print.
[I'll go out on a limb and presume some of the following, none of which may be true now but much of which may be true in the future.]
/19. Let's further say that they got that /19 from their parent provider's /16.
/19 goes back to the Tier 3 provider.
/24s or whatever. Now, I go to use my new /24 at my new provider and my router, running the blocked IP, can't talk to anything. Anyway, indefinitely is a long time -- is there any way to overcome it? Does anybody periodically check it? I'd hate to think that there's a bunch of null0 routes in some backbone router that nobody can remember why they're there...
4.) The null route stays in place as long as necessary, currently indefinitely.
Indefinitely is a long time. Let's say that the IP is part of a Tier 4 providers CIDR
The reason you could run a KP site on the original tier 4 provider's network is that they're damn near out of business and nobody cared about AUPs or about much of anything. The KP site kills the business, and the provider's
They re-slice it into
I mean really, there's always someone who says:
Get old (486/Pentium/PII), install capture card, xxx GB disk, xyz software, burner and its "as good as Tivo".
Occasionally you can substitute in "install linux, xwindows, etc" in there someplace.
You're right, doing anything that looks halfway professional with computer-based video isn't cheap or easy.
But do most people care? Considering that they can barely edit at all with a tape-based medium and that most home movies I've seen have a good 4-5 minutes of an extreme close-up of some guy's crotch and "IS THIS FUCKING THING ON?!?!?!?!?!" coming over the speakers, I'd bet that just being able to snip shit out and stick it straight on DVD without the animated, made-in-hollywood DVD menuing is good enough for most people.
As the other posters have indicated, there are emulators for 'other' platforms that can do this.
What'd be interesting would be a purpose-built commercial emulator that could do this, hook up to a TV and play actual ROM carts from all those systems.
With the right licensing, I'm sure that Sega and Nintendo and especially older (Atari, etc) vendors wouldn't care, especially if it was designed to use legit media (ROM carts or official CDs). They're not making money selling the hardware, and they can only make money selling paid-for software again (presuming the device has a CD player or something they can supply old games on in a media format cheaper than making rom carts).
The only objection I could imagine would be a small fear that "the retrostation" would canibalize sales from new hardware, but even that's iffy, since people that want to play the old games are probably dedicated enough to own *new* consoles and people that own none want the newer systems (PS2, Xbox, gamecube, etc).
The bummer is that the hardware would probably be too expensive (since it'd probably be a cut-down PC inside).
The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.
For a lot of people it *does* appear to be faster, but it's not just simple CPU speed. If the average CPU updater is creaking along on a 1st or even 2nd generation PII (233-450Mhz) system, chances are they also have little RAM (as little as 32MB), a much slower memory bus (66Mhz on 1st gen PIIs) and slow disk drive, a weak video card and a creaky OS and browser
When you move up to a contemporary machine you end up with a better Windows (2K and XP are superior to 95 and 98) running a newer browser, more RAM which reduces swapping, and when swapping DOES happen it happens to a faster disk at ATA-66 or even ATA-100 speeds with little fragmentation.
All this does add up to a browsing experience that seems faster to most people. The cognescenti realize that its just a better machine and that the internet pipe is no better, but to the other 99.5% of the computer-using population the internet got faster..
Hard to see where the gain comes from. Their stock has underpeformed the NASDAQ and the S&P by something on the order of 45% in the past year and is off nearly 70% from a year ago.
I think there's a lot of money changing hands in the porn industry, but I can't believe that outside of a few niche players (Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, some video companies) that there's this massive, platinum-plated industry out there. I think there's a lot of places just breaking even, and an awful lot of organized crime skimming going on.
I've had long contact with Groupware systems (have installed and run Exchange & Groupwise systems for several years), and I'm always amazed at why someone hasn't managed to take the IMAP standard and extend it so that it's simpler to interface with more vanilla clients or lower-end clients.
Basically even the "full" client would talk IMAP to the server and then render the data to whatever GUI calendaring/scheduling stuff it would want. The advantage is that vanilla text IMAP clients could still enumerate a folder and read non-mail data as messages, and perhaps even send mail messages that could be interpreted by the server as non-mail items (appointment, tasks, etc).
Exchange's IMAP functionality kind of does this, but calendar items don't show up as anything more than URLs to the Exchange web client.
That's all well and good in a philosophical perspective, but there's a here-and-now, why would you sell tools that help limit freedom to people that are willing to drive tanks over their own citizens?
Why would you be willing to sell them ANYTHING? A lot of stink has been made over buying "blood" diamonds from Sierra Leone and Angola -- why shouldn't the money Cisco made from China be seen as "blood money"?
That's because fucking capitalists have only commerce as a value. They don't really care about freedom or democracy except as defined by the ability to buy elected officials.
Boeing sold missle technology to the Chinese, too. If the AK-47 wasn't such a great rifle, I'd bet that Colt would sell them M-16s too.
Wasn't it Kruschev who said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope they'd hang them with?
It's all true.
You're not kidding. I start reading stuff like this and I start wondering if its not too late to go analog and give up on computers and do something else.
I mean, once they hammer all the fun out of it by making it like cable TV what's the fucking point?
Microsoft's ability to manipulate hardware vendors was really great when there were dozens of vendors and the threat of being cut off from Windows was a meaningful threat to vendors PC business.
The big hardware markets have change dramatically; HP, Dell, and IBM. I just cannot imagine that Microsoft would be will to try brinksmanship with their number one customer.
It's also an empty threat in many cases as business customers often have Select or Enterprise Agreements that can provide them with Windows. They'd likely be THRILLED to buy naked Compaq desktops at a steep discount from HP that they could put their already-acquired MS software onto.
Secondly, MS would lose a major revenue stream which would nail their profits hard and probably introduce MSFT stock to a new price floor, which kills employee pay and benefits.
Thirdly, it would only STRENGTHEN the bargaining position of the remaining PC hardware vendors.
Plus, the idea of pissing off the two remaining HW vendors enough that they stop giving MS a percentage of every PC they make, pick another OS to distribute and generally dump MS has got to make MS really, really scared...
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
I don't get it. If I moved from n to 1 on the list of a vendor's customers, why wouldn't I see increased leverage with my vendor? The story implies that being the number one customer of Microsoft is tantamount to losing leverage ("more dependant")?
It's a semantic argument to be sure, but regardless of what Bruce said about Microsoft you would think that they wouldn't want to damage their reputation with their number one customer, would you?
Or is this all about MS playing Dell and HP off each other?
Funyuns rock. I have a hard time understanding why they still make them, since I'm the only person I know that likes them and eats them with any regularity.
4K workers is a lot, especially if they're at a single at a small enough number of sites to have over 1k employees per site.
You'd think in that situation that there would be enough turnover or risk to hire somebody with a security background to monitor the security systems (alarms, cameras, card-key systems).
And a lot of places sell or work with valuable, high risk or dangerous materials (weapons, drugs, precious metals & gems, chemicals, radioactive materials, etc). I'd imagine that insurance would demand a more rigorous security situation than property-management supplied "security" (which really are nothing more than rent-a-suits).
Although even for plain-old big buildings, what kind of security do you *want* other than security guards (and the usual card-access systems and cameras)? Ex-Mossad guys with MP5s, German Shepherds and "interrogation" rooms?
Maybe I'm just security unaware, but it strikes me that you can take a long walk down a paranoid road for little purpose...
For years, Apple ignored the game market, as they wanted the Mac to be a "serious" computer, and games where seen to be secondary/tertiary to business/educational use.
Which is why they named and colored a whole line of them like fruit?
I hope its minesweeper or the networked hearts game.
No, I just based it upon the number of third party campaigns I've seen totally tank and the overwhelming number of libertarian party campaigns that go nowhere.
As for facts specific to this particular situation, the last libertarian candidate got less than 9% of the vote. This leads me to believe that libertarian politics are weak and aren't really a big draw.
Even a recent News-Record column said that "success" for Grubb in this particular race would be 25% of the vote. This just demonstrates that she's a here-and-now, single-issue candidate who doesn't have any real backing or substance.
If you want you can cry now over her loss and move on and find something else to cry about later on, or you can keep investing false hope in a non-solution and be REALLY disappointed when she's back to temping at the mall.
If you think backing the libertarian candidate is the way to victory, you're lost.
I agree with the theoretical notion that if we all got involved we could elect better and even third party candidates, but the libertarian party isn't going to have enough appeal to most voters and will actually turn off many voters.