The only substitute for oil and natural gas that could potentially start to come online in about 10-20 years is production of synthetic petroleum from cellulose and algae. Not ethanol, not "bio-diesel", but something with distillates that are at a minimum compatible with mined petroleum.
The petroleum economy itself isn't so bad. The problem is that it has a net carbon load, and that supplies of petroleum are finite. Find a way to turn sunlight & nutrients into petroleum, make it efficient, and viola! Problem solved, and you don't even need to change the pumps at the gas station.
Oddly enough, the best way to stimulate this process is to keep pumping oil, but pump higher and higher priced oil (like the Bakken stuff). Oil at $60-$100 a barrel permanently will make this research more than viable.
ASUS's EeePc has the bigger manufactures salivating. Their nothing thinking standard desktop/laptop replacement, they're trying to look at alternative markets.
Disposable computers, super-light-weight computers, computers for Grandma/Grandpa, and network-only computers.
These are all areas in which Vista cannot compete at a given price range, and are separate market segments from traditional computing. The only problem (for Microsoft) is that if Linux catches on in all these spaces, Linux will finally have a strong niche from which to leap into the mainstream market.
If there are 50-150 million lightweight, 1+ ghz Linux laptops out there with a GMA X3100 or equivalent graphics chip; then there's a beautiful market for software. Games included.
Agreed. The correct way to reward executives is option packages with a strike price significantly above the current value.
And if you (as in a board of directors) want to support long-term growth/stability, then issue options that cannot be exercised until a certain date (months/years).
Patrick Durusau is an idiot, because of one simple argument:
ODF is not difficult to implement. MS could implement it side-by-side with OOXML, and loose nothing. Implementation of ODF in Office 2007 would be sufficient to meet any government regulation. There's plenty of time to quickly finish the ODF plugin for 2007, and more than enough time to put ODF in Office 14.
Durusau got bribed or threatened, plain and simple. There's nothing to stop MS from implementing ODF as a checkbox, and all of this gamesmanship is an attempt by MS to keep ODF-only products out of government.
This simple argument answers all of his "reasons" as to why the broken OOXML standard should be fast-tracked.
They'll whine and bitch about it, then set about trying to corrupt ODF with extensions, and 'Non-standard' implementations. Sell an ODF-compliant version of Office 2007 strictly for government use, having it break on all kinds of complex documents, and not release this version of Office to the public or businesses until the next version of Office (14) is out.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
This is just a first battle. After OOXML is rejected, MS will sorta-kinda-possibly implement ODF for some customers. It might cost more. It might not be available to academics. And then we'll have to fight tooth and nail against the broken implementation, with MS promising to get it right "the next time", in Office 14, due out in 2009.
Witness IE, Media Player, Outlook, or any other product Microsoft has built with non-standard standards support. (The big one, of course, is the Windows POSIX implementation).
This is *precisely* why, if we want interoperability, it makes sense NOT to ratify OOXML as an ISO standard.
Office 2007 will be what it is. It will not conform 100% to OOXML, just "good enough" to pass recognition. It will be used in government offices, because it meets the "ISO" checkbox, the same way NT meets the "POSNIX" checkbox. And contrary to TFA, MS already knows what formats Office 14 will support; and hasn't bother to discuss that with ECMA/ISO or anyone else.
On the other hand, if OOXML is NOT ratified, Microsoft will be forced to support ODF. It's silly to believe that Office 2007 & Office 14 will not support ODF for government usage if governments require ODF.
Better yet, its easier to test ODF compliance, because the spec is shorter, and there are already multiple implementations. Government may be big and bribable, but they are a good deal more willing to listen to multiple arguments than big business is; particularly when there are big bribers on *both* sides of the aisle (Microsoft, meet Oracle/IBM).
Microsoft has already admitted (on Brian Jones's blog) that Office 14 may or may not meet OOXML, depending upon whether or not ECMA is willing to incorporate any changes to the spec that Microsoft may or may not release. Microsoft most certainly indicated that if Office 14 went "in a different direction" than ECMA, they wouldn't be able to commit to the standard.
This is -very-, -very- different than the way most standard work.
non-Microsoft products are a hard sell because they cannot be trusted to work with Microsoft products. Create a generic standard, and then require government vendors to meet it, and all of a sudden it becomes much more possible to sell non-Microsoft products.
Exactly how it worked with POSIX and Windows NT/2000, right?
We sure showed Microsoft there, huh?
Re:You're not really making $7.50/unit.
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
" You're not really making $7.50/unit, because you're not accounting for production, distribution and marketing. If you leave those out, then of course it'll look cheap. "
Doesn't matter. With a valid business model, those things are inexpensive and mostly pay for themselves.
There's a reason business, you know, invests into capital expenditures. When you invest in distribution or marketing, your paying someone to help you sell more units; because there is still room between the vast per-unit profit you are making and the point where additional capital returns generate negative total income.
If it wasn't driving sales, RIAA labels wouldn't employ top-notch production teams in building albums. They'd record them on an MP3 camera phone and press that directly to disk. And if audiences didn't buy albums based on super-expensive cover artwork, a label would release it with low-cost artwork; or none at all, if it could get away.
And distribution? Perhaps distributors would consider buying CDs if they thought they represented a good value; i.e. they could sell these "CD" things for more than they purchased them. Without, that is, a marketing subsidy.
Not to mention that each level in the distribution chain tends not to settle for less than 43% net income, particularly retailers.
Basically, if the per-unit cost(meaning the cost to press that CD, print the label, an put it in a case with a full-color cardboard sleeve on it) is still _at most_ 30-40% of MSRP ($6.40); if they spend a _ton_ of money on it. At most, the unit cost of manufacturing is in the $2.50 range (that how much it takes to make 100!). At 50,000 level, and particularly the 500,000 level, these things become incredibly cheap. The total cost curve starts to flatten out. You'd be shocked at how low it is below the retail MSRP, because at those volumes (500,000-millions) the revenue streams become bankable. The percentage of unit costs that is fixed cost approaches nearly nil, and it becomes dead easy to borrow money (find an institution to invest in you) to finance production. Particularly if you have most of the equipment.
Lets be generous, and say that comes to $1.25. That's HALF what it takes to make 100. That's more than what it takes to make & package a foam shoe. It's probably around the price of cheap perfume products. And is certainly a great deal more than some generic pharmaceutical products, and those two categories of product have FDA requirements and excessive, tamperproof packaging. Lets be more generous, claim that retails are really gouging them, and paying "only" $4.80. Walmart claims to make a loss at $10.00; but who knows, maybe that includes some funky numbers. That means they make "only"$3.55 a CD, which is then blown on production costs, advertising.
What that means if they break even, or god forbid, loose money, is fully 3/4s of the money "made" on that album, by the label, is spent on marketing and and bribing distributors to take it. If you had product that was actually good enough to sell by itself; or, god forbid, a product for which a concert tour represented adequate marketing, that 3/4 would be all profit.
There's really only 2 scenarios. Either the RIAA labels are making obscene profits (50-90% of MSRP, depending upon volume), or the shit they put out is so bad that it is effectively unsellable without an expensive campaign to dress it up as "not shit".
Given the RIAA label's worsening financial state, I'd guess its the latter. It's too bloody expensive, and society as a whole thinks that those resources should be better spent on something else. Effectively, at $15.99 an album, music is too expensive for the market to want to buy it. Particularly when the market becomes more and more aware that there are distribution media for which the unit-cost is 0 (electronic).
Instead of selling you a $300 "chunk", they'll sell you a $99 base system, with $25 add ons. Networking? Check. Remote access? Check. Skip the media player? Fine, but you'll need to install XXX as a substitute.
Apple is irredeemably evil, and more obsessed with proprietary secrets than Microsoft, however, Apple doesn't practice 1/2 of the dirty business games that Microsoft plays.
Partnering with Microsoft is the kiss of death. Period. Microsoft will do legal & illegal things to fuck you, and then worry about the consequences later.
Apple doesn't do this; so even though Apple is a brutish sort of company, they're easier to do business with. Lawful Evil > Chaotic Evil;-)
Ahem. CS3 works just fine, natively, on Leopard. After all, Adobe releases Mac versions of most of their apps.
Not to mention that it is simply incorrect to say that Leopard ever has problems with anything as mundane as a file transfer, no matter how large the file.
Also shockingly, some cheap manufacturers are re-evaluating their labor requirements and are relocating to high-tech areas.
You'd be surprised at some of the commodity parts I've been buying in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Western manufacturing companies really are starting to get their acts together.
I'm not sure he's ranting at the $250 Dell PC; it's more the $800-$1200 mid-market "entertainment" PCs being sold at Circuit City and Best Buy which come with Intel GMA 915s.
I know its a preference thing, but I rejected a trackball after having tried for a good two months. I bought myself a ~$60 logitech trackball, and now the poor thing just sits on the shelf.
I just couldn't do it; which is fun, because most of the time I don't even play FPSs; just RTSs. I kept getting my ass handed to me in CS and TF2, so I went back to my mouse.
Maybe I'm incompetent. I'm not the best FPSer, anyways:)
The "vaunted" MS Research team has put out a "concept" OS that doesn't run _any_ applications, and cannot be used for any commercial purpose, and has no indications that it can be licensed. It's only claim to fame is that its an MS OS; there have been 100% managed code OSs before.
Just last month Arstechnica had an article about two similar OSs, except they are written entirely in C#, without the C++ HAL in Singularity.
Both are REAL opensource. As is jnode.
In short, who gives a flaming f**k? As usual, MS is a day late and a dollar short, which is impressive considering that the "research team" working on singularity seems to be 30-40 people.
People are really, really stupid. Once your system is compromised, it is *not-fixable*. There is no reliable, effective way to insure that your system is untampered with unless you can do a bit-wise verification of every executable on the system, and even that isn't 100%; you really need to check *every* file against a "known-good" one.
I've seen plenty of systems with "up-to-date" antivirus get hosed, and they generally don't seem to be the same afterwards. Not to mention that few, if any antivirus packages are better than 95%.
If you can't keep your system clean, it isn't reliable. The only thing antivirus is really good for is as a means to determine if you need to wipe and re-install. For business purposes, I believe this to be unacceptable, and I cannot fathom why people don't switch to systems that do not require this ridiculous kludge.
CDMA phones work on the subway in Chicago, and the city didn't even need to pay to have it installed!
Nope; the smaller local carrier (US Cellular) decided to make it their marketing point, and the other CDMA providers roam onto their network (I'm sure they pay exorbitant roaming rates).
We have dual T1s at my office. These replaced 6 POTS lines and a DSL.
All run on SBC/AT&T lines. We've had no fewer than 6 outages in the past 2 years, two of which lasted more than 24 hours, one of which lasted a week, and was related to some construction near a local AT&T office. All of these times we had *no* dialtone, and no 911. This is at a business, not a residence. We loose money when the phones don't work, and I thought we paid extra to make sure this didn't happen.
My cable modem at home has *never* been out for more than 6 hours, and while it has been out far more than 6 times over the last 2 years, the *vast* majority of those times has been for 15-30 minutes. I think we've had 2 longer outages, one for 6 hours, and one for 2 hours. And that's with Comcast, well recognized as one of the crappier cable providers.
Why are we paying these ridiculous AT&T prices? I have no idea, but reliability sure ain't it.
1. Healthcare for those "in" in the U.S. surpasses anywhere else in the world, and yes I've had experience with European medicine. 2. Healthcare for those "out" in the U.S. is a real 3rd world nightmare, and yes, I've had experience with African medicine. 3. The reason that those "in" in the U.S. aren't as health as the rest of the 1st world is because many, if not most "well-off" people in the U.S. are obese. Obesity really is an epidemic in the U.S., and off all the industries out there healthcare is hit by this hardest. I would not be surprised to see % GDP costs of US healthcare drop substantially if we came up with a "solution" to obesity. Any of those nations that spend 30-40% less on healthcare also have a substantially "healthier" population to begin with. We, the U.S., as a nation, are fat and don't take care of our own health, relying upon the healthcare system to do so. And while there are many overweight people in Europe, there are far, far, far fewer of the morbidly obese.
I would love to see the government work with employers to try and generate a situation where all employees who couldn't afford individual coverage would be covered by their employers, and everyone who was unemployed would be covered under a state-by-state health care plan, since the uninsured end up costing the insured quite a bit of money. I would also say that no matter what kind of healthcare system we have, if the U.S. continues to be the fatest country in the world, we'll end up spending the most on healthcare, simply because diabetes, heart disease, and other weight related illnesses are extremely expensive to treat.
Honestly, that's one of my problems with Universal Blanket Health Care; why should I be paying the health bills of those who are unwilling to take even basic steps to maintain their own health. Europeans aren't communist; Europeans wouldn't be willing to manage the finances of those who refuses to take care of even the most basic aspects of their financial health. Why should I (my taxes) have to take care of 400+ lb two-pack-a-day alcoholics? I'll pay for their bariatric bypass and liver transplant when they help pay my mortgage.
Speaking of which; I can't understand why my taxes should be paying to bail people out who bought houses they couldn't afford, but I guess I don't really properly understand the gambling inherent in moral hazards. Apparently, the U.S. is becoming the country where you generate the greatest returns by throwing caution into the wind and allowing other people to pick up the pieces.
Perhaps I'm bitter, but I have no problems paying for health care for those who can't afford it, and who deserve it, but there are too many people who *could* afford if it they spent a little less on frivolity and appearance.
In the U.S., we'd usually rather have (on a consumer level) Fast & Cheap. Not Fast & Reliable, nor Cheap & Reliable.
Case in point; I'd rather have my 16 Mbps cablemodem than a 4 Mbps DSL, even though the DSL will get slightly better uptime, and is slightly cheaper. Also, I probably wouldn't upgrade to fiber if it was more than 5-10% more expensive, since the hour or two my cable modem is down really isn't a big deal.
Today, people have multiple forms of communication. It unlikely that your cellphone and VoIP will fail at the same time, and in case the reliability of both combined is similar to POTS these days. If my Internet is down for an hour? Big deal; I'll watch TV. And if TV is down? I'll watch a DVD, or read a book, or take a bath. Or maybe even step outside.
You can't have fast, cheap, and reliable. It simply doesn't work. Either the network contains redundancy, or it doesn't, and redundancy costs money, money that could better be used on capacity. It's the same thing with cellphones. A more dense network of towers means you can deploy fewer towers nationwide, unless you simply deploy more towers than your competitors, but then you're going to have to spend more, and the service will cost more. Therefore, consumers are willing to put up with dropped calls, up to a point.
You see, the market *has* decided. Instead of doing it "government style", the way the POTS network was built, we traded 5 nines reliability for speed and capital efficiency. Under the yoke of AT&T, communications in this country barely advanced, and the ideological successor to the old AT&T, SBC cum AT&T, we're seeing the deployment of a "fiber" network that maxes out at 1 HD stream and 6 Mbps, which is way behind the offerings of all other carriers. But by george, it was Cheap and Reliable!
That's not what consumers want, and isn't really even what most businesses want. Of course, people get upset when reliability goes _substantially_ down, i.e. more than a few hours a month. I think perhaps we are at 98% or 99% reliable. But that is most definitely good enough, and the resources that would be used to improve that are better spent on other issues.
Open Heart Surgery? 99.999% would be great! Cable and Internet? 98% is good enough.
Notable quotes: OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat. * Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence... that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects. *...to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company. * OSS is long-term credible... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it. * Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world. * Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities. * OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market. * The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.
The best metric is per-system average number of security failures. Not potential vulnerabilities; "Real-World" functionality. Otherwise, you can't hold up the "MS" software ecosystem as a feature of Vista.
Whenever the government takes in more money than it spends (surplus), this tends toward deflation. The Treasury pays off its loans from the Fed, resulting in money evaporating from the Reserve Banking system entirely! All those people calling for the government to balance its budget have no idea what they are talking about - if the government did that over the long term it would cause major shocks to our financial system.
This no reason to not exercise fiscal restraint.
The main reason most people want to see cuts in spending is to make room for cuts in taxes. And you can hardly say that the current government understands the money supply through the lens you are describing; obviously, there isn't room for endless inflation, or infinite fiat currency.
Fiscal restraint doesn't mean fiscal stupidity, and retiring some of the current government's debt is not necessarily a bad idea.
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The only substitute for oil and natural gas that could potentially start to come online in about 10-20 years is production of synthetic petroleum from cellulose and algae. Not ethanol, not "bio-diesel", but something with distillates that are at a minimum compatible with mined petroleum.
The petroleum economy itself isn't so bad. The problem is that it has a net carbon load, and that supplies of petroleum are finite. Find a way to turn sunlight & nutrients into petroleum, make it efficient, and viola! Problem solved, and you don't even need to change the pumps at the gas station.
Oddly enough, the best way to stimulate this process is to keep pumping oil, but pump higher and higher priced oil (like the Bakken stuff). Oil at $60-$100 a barrel permanently will make this research more than viable.
They did.
That's why they ship Linux
ASUS's EeePc has the bigger manufactures salivating. Their nothing thinking standard desktop/laptop replacement, they're trying to look at alternative markets.
Disposable computers, super-light-weight computers, computers for Grandma/Grandpa, and network-only computers.
These are all areas in which Vista cannot compete at a given price range, and are separate market segments from traditional computing. The only problem (for Microsoft) is that if Linux catches on in all these spaces, Linux will finally have a strong niche from which to leap into the mainstream market.
If there are 50-150 million lightweight, 1+ ghz Linux laptops out there with a GMA X3100 or equivalent graphics chip; then there's a beautiful market for software. Games included.
Agreed. The correct way to reward executives is option packages with a strike price significantly above the current value.
And if you (as in a board of directors) want to support long-term growth/stability, then issue options that cannot be exercised until a certain date (months/years).
I think that is the realm of OpenRT instead.
Patrick Durusau is an idiot, because of one simple argument:
ODF is not difficult to implement. MS could implement it side-by-side with OOXML, and loose nothing. Implementation of ODF in Office 2007 would be sufficient to meet any government regulation. There's plenty of time to quickly finish the ODF plugin for 2007, and more than enough time to put ODF in Office 14.
Durusau got bribed or threatened, plain and simple. There's nothing to stop MS from implementing ODF as a checkbox, and all of this gamesmanship is an attempt by MS to keep ODF-only products out of government.
This simple argument answers all of his "reasons" as to why the broken OOXML standard should be fast-tracked.
They won't.
They'll whine and bitch about it, then set about trying to corrupt ODF with extensions, and 'Non-standard' implementations. Sell an ODF-compliant version of Office 2007 strictly for government use, having it break on all kinds of complex documents, and not release this version of Office to the public or businesses until the next version of Office (14) is out.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
This is just a first battle. After OOXML is rejected, MS will sorta-kinda-possibly implement ODF for some customers. It might cost more. It might not be available to academics. And then we'll have to fight tooth and nail against the broken implementation, with MS promising to get it right "the next time", in Office 14, due out in 2009.
Witness IE, Media Player, Outlook, or any other product Microsoft has built with non-standard standards support. (The big one, of course, is the Windows POSIX implementation).
This is *precisely* why, if we want interoperability, it makes sense NOT to ratify OOXML as an ISO standard.
Office 2007 will be what it is. It will not conform 100% to OOXML, just "good enough" to pass recognition. It will be used in government offices, because it meets the "ISO" checkbox, the same way NT meets the "POSNIX" checkbox. And contrary to TFA, MS already knows what formats Office 14 will support; and hasn't bother to discuss that with ECMA/ISO or anyone else.
On the other hand, if OOXML is NOT ratified, Microsoft will be forced to support ODF. It's silly to believe that Office 2007 & Office 14 will not support ODF for government usage if governments require ODF.
Better yet, its easier to test ODF compliance, because the spec is shorter, and there are already multiple implementations. Government may be big and bribable, but they are a good deal more willing to listen to multiple arguments than big business is; particularly when there are big bribers on *both* sides of the aisle (Microsoft, meet Oracle/IBM).
Microsoft has already admitted (on Brian Jones's blog) that Office 14 may or may not meet OOXML, depending upon whether or not ECMA is willing to incorporate any changes to the spec that Microsoft may or may not release. Microsoft most certainly indicated that if Office 14 went "in a different direction" than ECMA, they wouldn't be able to commit to the standard.
This is -very-, -very- different than the way most standard work.
non-Microsoft products are a hard sell because they cannot be trusted to work with Microsoft products. Create a generic standard, and then require government vendors to meet it, and all of a sudden it becomes much more possible to sell non-Microsoft products.
Exactly how it worked with POSIX and Windows NT/2000, right?
We sure showed Microsoft there, huh?
" You're not really making $7.50/unit, because you're not accounting for production, distribution and marketing. If you leave those out, then of course it'll look cheap. "
Doesn't matter. With a valid business model, those things are inexpensive and mostly pay for themselves.
There's a reason business, you know, invests into capital expenditures. When you invest in distribution or marketing, your paying someone to help you sell more units; because there is still room between the vast per-unit profit you are making and the point where additional capital returns generate negative total income.
If it wasn't driving sales, RIAA labels wouldn't employ top-notch production teams in building albums. They'd record them on an MP3 camera phone and press that directly to disk. And if audiences didn't buy albums based on super-expensive cover artwork, a label would release it with low-cost artwork; or none at all, if it could get away.
And distribution? Perhaps distributors would consider buying CDs if they thought they represented a good value; i.e. they could sell these "CD" things for more than they purchased them. Without, that is, a marketing subsidy.
Not to mention that each level in the distribution chain tends not to settle for less than 43% net income, particularly retailers.
Basically, if the per-unit cost(meaning the cost to press that CD, print the label, an put it in a case with a full-color cardboard sleeve on it) is still _at most_ 30-40% of MSRP ($6.40); if they spend a _ton_ of money on it. At most, the unit cost of manufacturing is in the $2.50 range (that how much it takes to make 100!). At 50,000 level, and particularly the 500,000 level, these things become incredibly cheap. The total cost curve starts to flatten out. You'd be shocked at how low it is below the retail MSRP, because at those volumes (500,000-millions) the revenue streams become bankable. The percentage of unit costs that is fixed cost approaches nearly nil, and it becomes dead easy to borrow money (find an institution to invest in you) to finance production. Particularly if you have most of the equipment.
Lets be generous, and say that comes to $1.25. That's HALF what it takes to make 100. That's more than what it takes to make & package a foam shoe. It's probably around the price of cheap perfume products. And is certainly a great deal more than some generic pharmaceutical products, and those two categories of product have FDA requirements and excessive, tamperproof packaging. Lets be more generous, claim that retails are really gouging them, and paying "only" $4.80. Walmart claims to make a loss at $10.00; but who knows, maybe that includes some funky numbers. That means they make "only"$3.55 a CD, which is then blown on production costs, advertising.
What that means if they break even, or god forbid, loose money, is fully 3/4s of the money "made" on that album, by the label, is spent on marketing and and bribing distributors to take it. If you had product that was actually good enough to sell by itself; or, god forbid, a product for which a concert tour represented adequate marketing, that 3/4 would be all profit.
There's really only 2 scenarios. Either the RIAA labels are making obscene profits (50-90% of MSRP, depending upon volume), or the shit they put out is so bad that it is effectively unsellable without an expensive campaign to dress it up as "not shit".
Given the RIAA label's worsening financial state, I'd guess its the latter. It's too bloody expensive, and society as a whole thinks that those resources should be better spent on something else. Effectively, at $15.99 an album, music is too expensive for the market to want to buy it. Particularly when the market becomes more and more aware that there are distribution media for which the unit-cost is 0 (electronic).
Sales and Marketing?
Instead of selling you a $300 "chunk", they'll sell you a $99 base system, with $25 add ons. Networking? Check. Remote access? Check. Skip the media player? Fine, but you'll need to install XXX as a substitute.
Apple is irredeemably evil, and more obsessed with proprietary secrets than Microsoft, however, Apple doesn't practice 1/2 of the dirty business games that Microsoft plays.
;-)
Partnering with Microsoft is the kiss of death. Period. Microsoft will do legal & illegal things to fuck you, and then worry about the consequences later.
Apple doesn't do this; so even though Apple is a brutish sort of company, they're easier to do business with. Lawful Evil > Chaotic Evil
Ahem. CS3 works just fine, natively, on Leopard. After all, Adobe releases Mac versions of most of their apps.
Not to mention that it is simply incorrect to say that Leopard ever has problems with anything as mundane as a file transfer, no matter how large the file.
Also shockingly, some cheap manufacturers are re-evaluating their labor requirements and are relocating to high-tech areas.
You'd be surprised at some of the commodity parts I've been buying in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Western manufacturing companies really are starting to get their acts together.
I'm not sure he's ranting at the $250 Dell PC; it's more the $800-$1200 mid-market "entertainment" PCs being sold at Circuit City and Best Buy which come with Intel GMA 915s.
:)
:)
I know its a preference thing, but I rejected a trackball after having tried for a good two months. I bought myself a ~$60 logitech trackball, and now the poor thing just sits on the shelf.
I just couldn't do it; which is fun, because most of the time I don't even play FPSs; just RTSs. I kept getting my ass handed to me in CS and TF2, so I went back to my mouse.
Maybe I'm incompetent. I'm not the best FPSer, anyways
Frankly, this is stupid.
The "vaunted" MS Research team has put out a "concept" OS that doesn't run _any_ applications, and cannot be used for any commercial purpose, and has no indications that it can be licensed. It's only claim to fame is that its an MS OS; there have been 100% managed code OSs before.
Just last month Arstechnica had an article about two similar OSs, except they are written entirely in C#, without the C++ HAL in Singularity.
Both are REAL opensource. As is jnode.
In short, who gives a flaming f**k? As usual, MS is a day late and a dollar short, which is impressive considering that the "research team" working on singularity seems to be 30-40 people.
Good grief.
People are really, really stupid. Once your system is compromised, it is *not-fixable*. There is no reliable, effective way to insure that your system is untampered with unless you can do a bit-wise verification of every executable on the system, and even that isn't 100%; you really need to check *every* file against a "known-good" one.
I've seen plenty of systems with "up-to-date" antivirus get hosed, and they generally don't seem to be the same afterwards. Not to mention that few, if any antivirus packages are better than 95%.
If you can't keep your system clean, it isn't reliable. The only thing antivirus is really good for is as a means to determine if you need to wipe and re-install. For business purposes, I believe this to be unacceptable, and I cannot fathom why people don't switch to systems that do not require this ridiculous kludge.
CDMA phones work on the subway in Chicago, and the city didn't even need to pay to have it installed!
Nope; the smaller local carrier (US Cellular) decided to make it their marketing point, and the other CDMA providers roam onto their network (I'm sure they pay exorbitant roaming rates).
We have dual T1s at my office. These replaced 6 POTS lines and a DSL.
All run on SBC/AT&T lines. We've had no fewer than 6 outages in the past 2 years, two of which lasted more than 24 hours, one of which lasted a week, and was related to some construction near a local AT&T office. All of these times we had *no* dialtone, and no 911. This is at a business, not a residence. We loose money when the phones don't work, and I thought we paid extra to make sure this didn't happen.
My cable modem at home has *never* been out for more than 6 hours, and while it has been out far more than 6 times over the last 2 years, the *vast* majority of those times has been for 15-30 minutes. I think we've had 2 longer outages, one for 6 hours, and one for 2 hours. And that's with Comcast, well recognized as one of the crappier cable providers.
Why are we paying these ridiculous AT&T prices? I have no idea, but reliability sure ain't it.
I would suggest the following:
1. Healthcare for those "in" in the U.S. surpasses anywhere else in the world, and yes I've had experience with European medicine.
2. Healthcare for those "out" in the U.S. is a real 3rd world nightmare, and yes, I've had experience with African medicine.
3. The reason that those "in" in the U.S. aren't as health as the rest of the 1st world is because many, if not most "well-off" people in the U.S. are obese. Obesity really is an epidemic in the U.S., and off all the industries out there healthcare is hit by this hardest. I would not be surprised to see % GDP costs of US healthcare drop substantially if we came up with a "solution" to obesity. Any of those nations that spend 30-40% less on healthcare also have a substantially "healthier" population to begin with. We, the U.S., as a nation, are fat and don't take care of our own health, relying upon the healthcare system to do so. And while there are many overweight people in Europe, there are far, far, far fewer of the morbidly obese.
I would love to see the government work with employers to try and generate a situation where all employees who couldn't afford individual coverage would be covered by their employers, and everyone who was unemployed would be covered under a state-by-state health care plan, since the uninsured end up costing the insured quite a bit of money. I would also say that no matter what kind of healthcare system we have, if the U.S. continues to be the fatest country in the world, we'll end up spending the most on healthcare, simply because diabetes, heart disease, and other weight related illnesses are extremely expensive to treat.
Honestly, that's one of my problems with Universal Blanket Health Care; why should I be paying the health bills of those who are unwilling to take even basic steps to maintain their own health. Europeans aren't communist; Europeans wouldn't be willing to manage the finances of those who refuses to take care of even the most basic aspects of their financial health. Why should I (my taxes) have to take care of 400+ lb two-pack-a-day alcoholics? I'll pay for their bariatric bypass and liver transplant when they help pay my mortgage.
Speaking of which; I can't understand why my taxes should be paying to bail people out who bought houses they couldn't afford, but I guess I don't really properly understand the gambling inherent in moral hazards. Apparently, the U.S. is becoming the country where you generate the greatest returns by throwing caution into the wind and allowing other people to pick up the pieces.
Perhaps I'm bitter, but I have no problems paying for health care for those who can't afford it, and who deserve it, but there are too many people who *could* afford if it they spent a little less on frivolity and appearance.
It's because of value propositions.
In the U.S., we'd usually rather have (on a consumer level) Fast & Cheap. Not Fast & Reliable, nor Cheap & Reliable.
Case in point; I'd rather have my 16 Mbps cablemodem than a 4 Mbps DSL, even though the DSL will get slightly better uptime, and is slightly cheaper. Also, I probably wouldn't upgrade to fiber if it was more than 5-10% more expensive, since the hour or two my cable modem is down really isn't a big deal.
Today, people have multiple forms of communication. It unlikely that your cellphone and VoIP will fail at the same time, and in case the reliability of both combined is similar to POTS these days. If my Internet is down for an hour? Big deal; I'll watch TV. And if TV is down? I'll watch a DVD, or read a book, or take a bath. Or maybe even step outside.
You can't have fast, cheap, and reliable. It simply doesn't work. Either the network contains redundancy, or it doesn't, and redundancy costs money, money that could better be used on capacity. It's the same thing with cellphones. A more dense network of towers means you can deploy fewer towers nationwide, unless you simply deploy more towers than your competitors, but then you're going to have to spend more, and the service will cost more. Therefore, consumers are willing to put up with dropped calls, up to a point.
You see, the market *has* decided. Instead of doing it "government style", the way the POTS network was built, we traded 5 nines reliability for speed and capital efficiency. Under the yoke of AT&T, communications in this country barely advanced, and the ideological successor to the old AT&T, SBC cum AT&T, we're seeing the deployment of a "fiber" network that maxes out at 1 HD stream and 6 Mbps, which is way behind the offerings of all other carriers. But by george, it was Cheap and Reliable!
That's not what consumers want, and isn't really even what most businesses want. Of course, people get upset when reliability goes _substantially_ down, i.e. more than a few hours a month. I think perhaps we are at 98% or 99% reliable. But that is most definitely good enough, and the resources that would be used to improve that are better spent on other issues.
Open Heart Surgery? 99.999% would be great!
Cable and Internet? 98% is good enough.
Have you read the Halloween Documents?
... that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects. ...to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company. ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.
Notable quotes:
OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.
* Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence
*
* OSS is long-term credible
* Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
* The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.
There was more stuff linked to here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/03/1524250 but its fallen off the web, and I'm not sure where to find archives of it.
In short, its out there; internal stuff thats been leaked.
What metric are you using to say Vista is safer?
The best metric is per-system average number of security failures. Not potential vulnerabilities; "Real-World" functionality. Otherwise, you can't hold up the "MS" software ecosystem as a feature of Vista.
IANAME (I am not a murder expert :) )
But,
You're assuming that all of those murderers play videogames. I'd be quite skeptical thats the case.
Whenever the government takes in more money than it spends (surplus), this tends toward deflation. The Treasury pays off its loans from the Fed, resulting in money evaporating from the Reserve Banking system entirely! All those people calling for the government to balance its budget have no idea what they are talking about - if the government did that over the long term it would cause major shocks to our financial system.
This no reason to not exercise fiscal restraint.
The main reason most people want to see cuts in spending is to make room for cuts in taxes. And you can hardly say that the current government understands the money supply through the lens you are describing; obviously, there isn't room for endless inflation, or infinite fiat currency.
Fiscal restraint doesn't mean fiscal stupidity, and retiring some of the current government's debt is not necessarily a bad idea.