It would be really interesting to see what happened if solar energy became affordable enough to power people's homes. Based on current technology, the cost of solar panels is several thousands of dollars for a typical home's electricity needs. Over the lifetime of the panels, that's about 30 cents per kilowatt hour, which is three times the cost of typical utility fees.
I pay 20.6c/kwh for electricity (Australia)
A suitably sized solar system to cover my needs would pay itself off in 10 years (3kw solar system quoted for $10k), then it's free energy.
I wonder if there would be resistance from power companies if people were able to put cheap solar panels on their houses, or if they would buy up all the patents so you had to buy your panels from them.
Ah the old suppressed tech conspiracy theory. If solar panels were cheap enough to go mass market then the people holding the patents would be making more money than the power companies.
And yet, competitors like OpenOffice have been stealing market share from MS Office. By some accounts, OOo now holds over 20% of desktops. Then there's the internet apps like Google Documents, which are steadily increasing in user numbers.
Which just goes to show, the path to success is through innovation, not litigation (Yes Apple I'm looking at you)
Microsoft's response to Google Apps, "Office 365", is a subscription-based product that is not even available without paying a fee. Undoubtedly it's getting some attention in corporate circles, where they like to pay for such things, but no one else cares.
You say that as if the corporate market is some little two bit operation in the far corner of the room. The consumer market maybe a gold mine for Apple right now, but it is a fickle space to operate in. In 10 years most corporates will still run Windows/Office/Exchange/SQL, can you say the same about the your latest smartphone?
Apple's steadily becoming more common on the desktop, and they make very highly rated laptops, tablets, and phones. Yet, they're not a monopoly in any of these markets, and Android is overtaking the iPhone.
As above. If I had enough money to buy shares I'd be choosing MS over Apple right now.
I really don't see how Microsoft is more of a monopoly today than in the '90s. It's gradually becoming irrelevant, in fact. People are switching to handheld devices running mainly iOS or Android.
Consumers are switching to handheld devices. But if you want productivity the desktop still wins, and MS has 80%+ market share in that space.
In a few years, the average college student may not be using either Windows or MacOS, but instead they will be mainly familiar with these phone/tablet systems. Microsoft is a tiny player in this market so far.
May. May not. If I had to bet I'd say the keyboard and mouse aren't going anywhere soon. I work with all the latest toys as part of my job. From the top to the bottom everyone in the company loves playing on the latest gizmo, but invariably goes back to a desktop/laptop when they need to get shit done. We have dozens of iPads that sit dormant in desk drawers because after the first few weeks most people get sick of playing Angry Birds.
Basically this Wordperfect lawsuit is a bit dated and irrelevant today. I'm surprised it wasn't thrown out long ago.
If you want to talk dying IT companies, Novell is a prime target.
Agree. I read email, deal with it, then delete it.
15+ years of using email and I've never found any reason to keep email ever. My current work email inbox is less than 100MB, most of which was generated in the last couple of weeks. My personal email has nothing in it. Why bother?
Maybe I'm living in a different world but is removing overtime a bad thing? I'm an IT contractor and I don't get overtime. Currently whatever hours I work I get paid for at a flat hourly rate. I am contracted to 38 hours a week, and if my work requires more time they ask me, and I then choose to accept or decline.
In my previous role I was on a salary. Again 38 hours a week, except here if I was asked to work longer I didn't get paid any more so I negotiated time off in lieu for extra hours worked. There's nothing unfair about that IMO. If you don't want to work extra hours, don't work them. Have I missed something?
Even better... crack it then publish the answer so that a bunch of kiddies can apply and screw up the recruitment process. That is a hack all on its own:)
The simple fact is that religious people don't truly believe the stuff they claim. They might want to believe it, but not to the same level that I believe a bullet to the head will kill me. If you honestly believed 100% that when you die you go to a beautiful place then why mourn death? Why be afraid of death at all? It should be like winning the lotto when you find out you have a terminal illness, or a friend dies. Why even look when crossing the road, when that could be your path to nirvana? Because deep, deep down they don't believe. Just like the rest of us they know it's the end, but there's some sort of cognitive dissonance preventing them from accepting objective evidence.
Note that wasn't 214 people dead, or sterilized, it was 214 people who got the measles. A subset of them would have been permanently affected.
Perhaps as many as were affected by the last airline crash....
Or the elephant in the room, the 40000 that die each year on the roads in the US.
Since 9/11 nearly 1/2 a million have been killed on the roads. Where is our War on the Automobile?
Haha, reminds of a funny story. I used to work for a company owned by one of Australia's richest families. The owner's wife brought her phone in one day because it was playing up and it had a huge magnet stuck on the side of it. Her spiritual advisor told her it would prevent her from getting cancer, but all it did was prevent her phone from working correctly. Too much money, not enough brains.
If the end users knew better, they would be doing IT.
That right there is the exact attitude the OP was talking about;)
No offense, but I'm pretty sure more surgeons could learn how to troubleshoot a computer than system administrators could learn to remove an appendix. And they get paid accordingly.
Removing an appendix doesn't take much more skills than making a roast. The key with any skilled profession is not so much the actual task, but know when to apply it, and then how to deal with the problems when it all goes pear shaped.
Also pay rates are not related to skills, it is a function of value to the organisation. Most salespeople get more in their bonuses than both IT or Medical and they really couldn't do either profession.
To paraphrase: "it is a crime to allow a fool to keep their money".
There are far greater causes in this world than protecting the disposal income of suckers.
The issue is that free markets are predicated on basis of both parties being fully informed. Marketing and other forms of manipulation explicitly seek to control how well informed the consumer is - such as requiring non-disclosures in settlements for defective products.
Only if you swallow the marketing guff. When I bought my TV, I went to the shop, looked at all the TVs, found one that did what I need it to do at a price I thought was fair and bought it. If it doesn't work I take it back and get my money back. That is the free market in action.
I fail to see how any amount of marketing changes that?
If I hadn't already posted I'd mod you up.
I also have never bought anything from Apple, or Sony, or any other major marketing force (Apart from maybe Coke). I consider myself immune to marketing. I go the shop with a list and buy what's on the list. There is no fear of marketing unless you doubt your own mental strength.
And then what?
I read a lot of pro-privacy rants on Slashdot but haven't really heard any conclusive argument why these things are so bad.
Let's say a marketing dept finds out how often I shop, sleep, piss, and wank. What is the worst possible case scenario they could do with that info?
Let's say they read all my email, my web browsing habits and all my facebook posts what happens next that I need to be afraid of?
That is not a matter of "age" but of education or age based education.
History is full of 14 year olds becoming King or war lord or any other high abstract thinker.
But they didn't cognitively work themselves into those positions, and once there they were there generally puppets of their advisers until they were mature enough to think for themselves.
Generally the more advanced the society, the longer the development cycle. If you want to breed kids capable of eating, sleeping, fucking and killing then by all means let them loose at 14. If you want a positive contributor to a 21st advanced society then that will take a little bit longer.
I work for a managed service provider, our team deploy enterprise grade VMware, HyperV and Xen solutions to various customers based on need/religion. The unanimous opinion is that nothing compares to VMware. HyperV is shit. Xen is shit. ESX simply works better than everything else, has more features, and being the incumbent has the best support options (everyone knows and uses it so googling solutions is quite trivial).
The cheapest car you can buy in Australia is $15k ($US and $AU is about 1:1 presently), the cheapest hybrid is $30k.
Not sure what 'market' you're talking about, but this will be the cheapest product on the market, by a fair margin. If it works as advertised it will have no problems selling.
You don't. We used to have a fully managed BES setup, but the overhead of managing the Server, the devices, the accounts, the policy, billing and overspend etc was all too much. I appreciate this is not for everyone, but when your business is not as sensitive as govt or finance, you can be a bit more flexible.
Now we give employees an allowance, they buy their own phones (their choice but all choose either android or iOS), and we have a how-to page to setup their devices.
Overhead is now nearly zero for the IT dept and after the first month users have become self sufficient and figured out how to do all the tricks themselves. Win win (big lose for RIM).
Who the #)@# ships hundreds of thousands of products but doesn't do something so basic as... I don't know... turn one on and see if the #*^! keyboard works?!
The reason the ipad has been so successful isn't because it's some genius product--it's because the competition is evidently brain dead.
Mod up. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried a new product and thought "what the fuck were they thinking". Are Apple and MS the only companies in the world that do user interface testing?
Not sure if you've traveled much, but generally shops in every country are open during the day. If it's not night time, there's a good chance the shops are open. if it's recently been day time but now it's not, and you're hungry, then it's probably dinner time. If you're tired, you go to sleep. It is possible to function without a machine to tell you when to do things.
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It would be really interesting to see what happened if solar energy became affordable enough to power people's homes. Based on current technology, the cost of solar panels is several thousands of dollars for a typical home's electricity needs. Over the lifetime of the panels, that's about 30 cents per kilowatt hour, which is three times the cost of typical utility fees.
I pay 20.6c/kwh for electricity (Australia) A suitably sized solar system to cover my needs would pay itself off in 10 years (3kw solar system quoted for $10k), then it's free energy.
I wonder if there would be resistance from power companies if people were able to put cheap solar panels on their houses, or if they would buy up all the patents so you had to buy your panels from them.
Ah the old suppressed tech conspiracy theory. If solar panels were cheap enough to go mass market then the people holding the patents would be making more money than the power companies.
And yet, competitors like OpenOffice have been stealing market share from MS Office. By some accounts, OOo now holds over 20% of desktops. Then there's the internet apps like Google Documents, which are steadily increasing in user numbers.
Which just goes to show, the path to success is through innovation, not litigation (Yes Apple I'm looking at you)
Microsoft's response to Google Apps, "Office 365", is a subscription-based product that is not even available without paying a fee. Undoubtedly it's getting some attention in corporate circles, where they like to pay for such things, but no one else cares.
You say that as if the corporate market is some little two bit operation in the far corner of the room. The consumer market maybe a gold mine for Apple right now, but it is a fickle space to operate in. In 10 years most corporates will still run Windows/Office/Exchange/SQL, can you say the same about the your latest smartphone?
Apple's steadily becoming more common on the desktop, and they make very highly rated laptops, tablets, and phones. Yet, they're not a monopoly in any of these markets, and Android is overtaking the iPhone.
As above. If I had enough money to buy shares I'd be choosing MS over Apple right now.
I really don't see how Microsoft is more of a monopoly today than in the '90s. It's gradually becoming irrelevant, in fact. People are switching to handheld devices running mainly iOS or Android.
Consumers are switching to handheld devices. But if you want productivity the desktop still wins, and MS has 80%+ market share in that space.
In a few years, the average college student may not be using either Windows or MacOS, but instead they will be mainly familiar with these phone/tablet systems. Microsoft is a tiny player in this market so far.
May. May not. If I had to bet I'd say the keyboard and mouse aren't going anywhere soon. I work with all the latest toys as part of my job. From the top to the bottom everyone in the company loves playing on the latest gizmo, but invariably goes back to a desktop/laptop when they need to get shit done. We have dozens of iPads that sit dormant in desk drawers because after the first few weeks most people get sick of playing Angry Birds.
Basically this Wordperfect lawsuit is a bit dated and irrelevant today. I'm surprised it wasn't thrown out long ago.
If you want to talk dying IT companies, Novell is a prime target.
Agree. I read email, deal with it, then delete it. 15+ years of using email and I've never found any reason to keep email ever. My current work email inbox is less than 100MB, most of which was generated in the last couple of weeks. My personal email has nothing in it. Why bother?
Maybe I'm living in a different world but is removing overtime a bad thing? I'm an IT contractor and I don't get overtime. Currently whatever hours I work I get paid for at a flat hourly rate. I am contracted to 38 hours a week, and if my work requires more time they ask me, and I then choose to accept or decline. In my previous role I was on a salary. Again 38 hours a week, except here if I was asked to work longer I didn't get paid any more so I negotiated time off in lieu for extra hours worked. There's nothing unfair about that IMO. If you don't want to work extra hours, don't work them. Have I missed something?
Even better... crack it then publish the answer so that a bunch of kiddies can apply and screw up the recruitment process. That is a hack all on its own :)
The simple fact is that religious people don't truly believe the stuff they claim. They might want to believe it, but not to the same level that I believe a bullet to the head will kill me. If you honestly believed 100% that when you die you go to a beautiful place then why mourn death? Why be afraid of death at all? It should be like winning the lotto when you find out you have a terminal illness, or a friend dies. Why even look when crossing the road, when that could be your path to nirvana? Because deep, deep down they don't believe. Just like the rest of us they know it's the end, but there's some sort of cognitive dissonance preventing them from accepting objective evidence.
Dude, it's "losing". It's hard to come across sounding educated when you can't spell.
Note that wasn't 214 people dead, or sterilized, it was 214 people who got the measles. A subset of them would have been permanently affected.
Perhaps as many as were affected by the last airline crash....
Or the elephant in the room, the 40000 that die each year on the roads in the US. Since 9/11 nearly 1/2 a million have been killed on the roads. Where is our War on the Automobile?
Haha, reminds of a funny story. I used to work for a company owned by one of Australia's richest families. The owner's wife brought her phone in one day because it was playing up and it had a huge magnet stuck on the side of it. Her spiritual advisor told her it would prevent her from getting cancer, but all it did was prevent her phone from working correctly. Too much money, not enough brains.
If the end users knew better, they would be doing IT.
That right there is the exact attitude the OP was talking about ;)
No offense, but I'm pretty sure more surgeons could learn how to troubleshoot a computer than system administrators could learn to remove an appendix. And they get paid accordingly.
Removing an appendix doesn't take much more skills than making a roast. The key with any skilled profession is not so much the actual task, but know when to apply it, and then how to deal with the problems when it all goes pear shaped. Also pay rates are not related to skills, it is a function of value to the organisation. Most salespeople get more in their bonuses than both IT or Medical and they really couldn't do either profession.
To paraphrase: "it is a crime to allow a fool to keep their money". There are far greater causes in this world than protecting the disposal income of suckers.
The issue is that free markets are predicated on basis of both parties being fully informed. Marketing and other forms of manipulation explicitly seek to control how well informed the consumer is - such as requiring non-disclosures in settlements for defective products.
Only if you swallow the marketing guff. When I bought my TV, I went to the shop, looked at all the TVs, found one that did what I need it to do at a price I thought was fair and bought it. If it doesn't work I take it back and get my money back. That is the free market in action. I fail to see how any amount of marketing changes that?
If I hadn't already posted I'd mod you up. I also have never bought anything from Apple, or Sony, or any other major marketing force (Apart from maybe Coke). I consider myself immune to marketing. I go the shop with a list and buy what's on the list. There is no fear of marketing unless you doubt your own mental strength.
They will use it to improve their ability to get money out of your pocket and into theirs. Why do I want to help them do that??
The Force only works on the weak minded. Why worry?
And then what? I read a lot of pro-privacy rants on Slashdot but haven't really heard any conclusive argument why these things are so bad. Let's say a marketing dept finds out how often I shop, sleep, piss, and wank. What is the worst possible case scenario they could do with that info? Let's say they read all my email, my web browsing habits and all my facebook posts what happens next that I need to be afraid of?
Define "militant". Taking up arms in your own country to defend against a foreign invader hardly justifies being murdered.
That is not a matter of "age" but of education or age based education. History is full of 14 year olds becoming King or war lord or any other high abstract thinker.
But they didn't cognitively work themselves into those positions, and once there they were there generally puppets of their advisers until they were mature enough to think for themselves. Generally the more advanced the society, the longer the development cycle. If you want to breed kids capable of eating, sleeping, fucking and killing then by all means let them loose at 14. If you want a positive contributor to a 21st advanced society then that will take a little bit longer.
I work for a managed service provider, our team deploy enterprise grade VMware, HyperV and Xen solutions to various customers based on need/religion. The unanimous opinion is that nothing compares to VMware. HyperV is shit. Xen is shit. ESX simply works better than everything else, has more features, and being the incumbent has the best support options (everyone knows and uses it so googling solutions is quite trivial).
Fucking awesome logic. There's no point in making new things when you can buy second hand things for cheaper? Have I got that right?
The cheapest car you can buy in Australia is $15k ($US and $AU is about 1:1 presently), the cheapest hybrid is $30k. Not sure what 'market' you're talking about, but this will be the cheapest product on the market, by a fair margin. If it works as advertised it will have no problems selling.
No, but I do ride a Motorbike, and I'd like to think I am going to keep all my limbs.
People who've had motorbike crashes and soldiers? Is that what comes to people's minds when they think amputees?
You don't. We used to have a fully managed BES setup, but the overhead of managing the Server, the devices, the accounts, the policy, billing and overspend etc was all too much. I appreciate this is not for everyone, but when your business is not as sensitive as govt or finance, you can be a bit more flexible. Now we give employees an allowance, they buy their own phones (their choice but all choose either android or iOS), and we have a how-to page to setup their devices. Overhead is now nearly zero for the IT dept and after the first month users have become self sufficient and figured out how to do all the tricks themselves. Win win (big lose for RIM).
Who the #)@# ships hundreds of thousands of products but doesn't do something so basic as... I don't know... turn one on and see if the #*^! keyboard works?!
The reason the ipad has been so successful isn't because it's some genius product--it's because the competition is evidently brain dead.
Mod up. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried a new product and thought "what the fuck were they thinking". Are Apple and MS the only companies in the world that do user interface testing?
Not sure if you've traveled much, but generally shops in every country are open during the day. If it's not night time, there's a good chance the shops are open. if it's recently been day time but now it's not, and you're hungry, then it's probably dinner time. If you're tired, you go to sleep. It is possible to function without a machine to tell you when to do things.