The states might squeeze one or two small concessions out of Microsoft, but thats it. Any fantasies you have that the state of Iowa is going to force the breakup of Microsoft are just that.
Consider what this is - an outdated PC repackaged as a "device". Whats inside? A Pentium and maybe 64 MB of RAM? Add on the 40GB hard rive and you are looking at $350 tops for the parts.
As for having "all of my music in one box" - sure, if its portable. Why would I transfer all of the CDs in my jukebox over to another box, at lower fidelity? By virtue of having all of my CDs in my jukebox, all of my music is already in one box. The fact that the unit accesses the data on CDs instead of off of a hard drive is inconsequential.
The only value add I can see is tha TV interface. Not worth a grand.
This is as pathetic as the Audrey rollout by 3Com months ago. I makes me wince to watch the once venerable tech giants roll out ridiculous toys to the collective shrug of the consumer public.
HP in particular is just becoming sad. They've devolved from a tech powerhouse to a manufacturing dinosaur trying to compete with $39 inkjet printers I can buy at the grocery store (who cares if they are junk??), Dell in the PC world, and IBM in enterprise computing. Maybe its good that both founders are gone now, so they don't have to see their once-great creation mate with Compaq.
Parrot will be pivotal in years to come
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Perl6 for Mortals
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The creation of Parrot will allow for more languages, and better performance. It is pointless for the numerous language development teams to duplicate VM coding efforts - Parrot will allow them to treat the VM as a blackbox, running on any platform and providing solid fundamental functionality.
I am personally looking forward to the creation of much smaller Parrot-based languages that truncate their syntax set and functionality to truly see how far into the realm of performance we can push VM-based languages.
Did you expect the feds to shut off the supplier of software to 92% of the nations' consumers? Not to mention a huge supplier of software to the government. Not to mention a huge source of corporate tax revenue that employs top-margin taxpaying voters.
Did you think they would rip all of this apart to save companies like VA Linux and Novell?
The bottom line is the government has no interest in shutting down MS in any real capacity. Why would they? Microsoft is an American company employing taxpayers and paying vast corporate taxes.
Remember also that the government uses Microsoft products. They have no interest in turning off what is eventually going to be their biggest IT supplier, if Microsoft is not already.
Its pure fantasy to believe that the government ever had any real notion of destroying this company...they know that Microsoft has wormed itself far too deep into American consumer life to be yanked out violently. We're just going to have to live with them until something better comes along that consumers actually spend money on.
Actually, GM is probaly the worlds most powerful corporation. It employees the most people and has the most revenue
BZZT! Walmart employs three times as many people (1.2 million compared to 380k at GM).
GM has huge revenues, (WMT is near but a little less), but WalMart and many others have vastly more income than GM. Walmart hd income of 3 billion, GM has 386 million in the last recorded quarter.
So far I see posters in glee over the hope that the states will break up MS, the XP will be Bill's ruin, and all sorts of other inane fantasies.
Get real folks, Microsoft is more powerful than ever. This only solidifies their empire. They are the world's most powerful corporation by a long shot, and they have almost a complete stranglehold over the consumer computing experience.
For consumers, its boiled down to two choices - AOL or Microsoft. Take your pick, everyone else is chump change at this point.
Of course most of us understand the idea of structured data. The point is there are already better ways of storing and retrieving structured data on a server, and very little compelling reason to send content-oriented data through to the web client, where presentation rules and all attempts at disintermediating presentation have fallen flat.
Yet its the working definition you'll find in many articles at XML.com. Why would you presume XML serves some larger purpose?
XSL/XSLT has been around for a while now, and its user base has only been expanding.
Once again, XML.com has some very informed articles trashing XSL, and they aren't naive posts by someone who just read the WROX book. Stop by and read them.
The government has basically signed off of antitrust for the forseeable future. With the economy in the dumps the last thing they want to do now is shave another 20% off of the markets (yes, splitting MS would do this).
Until the terrorist threat has passed, the government is totally preoccupied and won't touch MS significantly at this point.
the fact that Microsoft doesn't simply step off and allow you to visit the site with any browser you like is the problem.
But its only a problem for the 10% of users who either don't use XP or IE. Frankly they can get away with shunning this market as it is a lost cause anyway - that 10% will never migrate to Microsoft tools if they haven't already.
This isn't about being a good corporate citizen - MS has never cared about that in any case (because nice guys finish last). Its about locking people into a close network of sites that support extended A/V and interactivity that joe user will drool over and pay for.
MSN will simply be another AOL, and yes, most consumers will gladly allow themselves to be locked into one of these networks.
Look for example at gnu.org, its fast and simple and you can find what your looking for.
If you think you can make money with a site as sparse as gnu.org, be my guest.
The web is a platofrm for consumer products - the geek minimalist lynx user market is so infinitesimally small that it would be idiotic for any website designer to predicate a site layout based on it.
I'm just trying to make a point about how promising, well-planned universal standards are corrupted, and basically destroyed, when applied incorrectly, mainly by incompetent/ignorant people or by corporations who aren't able to see the long-term consequences of their actions because they're blinded by the aspects of profit.
Please point me to the part of the table standard (or even the CALS derivation that spawned it), that say you should not use tables for presentation or layout.
Let me tell you from experience that major web sites get huge volumes of crank mail and you are often going directly to the bin bucket when you waste your time sending them.
Major web sites work from server logs, useage stats, competitive metrics and other metrics to devise their site design.
And frankly the interest group you represent is so infinitesimally small that they would be idiots to listen to you in the first place (and they know it).
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Yes, Java is useable, yes it is improving. But the client apps are butt-ugly, still too slow, and the setup is still kludgey for most.
IBM is probably figuring out that despite millions of dollars in marketing, and a semi-united front promoting the technology, Java is just a dog.
This pseudoscience about organizational dynamics is what is referred to as curve fitting - using your results to frame your hypothesis.
"Loosely decentralized virtual organizations" could just as soon describe a bowling team. Its gibberish folks.
Rapid deployment and subsequent revisioning is the secret behind many of the largest software companies in the world.
Ultimately you have to sell a product and pay your employees, and the NASA model is never going to do that.
The Feds have settled, its over. Time to move on.
As for having "all of my music in one box" - sure, if its portable. Why would I transfer all of the CDs in my jukebox over to another box, at lower fidelity? By virtue of having all of my CDs in my jukebox, all of my music is already in one box. The fact that the unit accesses the data on CDs instead of off of a hard drive is inconsequential.
The only value add I can see is tha TV interface. Not worth a grand.
This is as pathetic as the Audrey rollout by 3Com months ago. I makes me wince to watch the once venerable tech giants roll out ridiculous toys to the collective shrug of the consumer public.
HP in particular is just becoming sad. They've devolved from a tech powerhouse to a manufacturing dinosaur trying to compete with $39 inkjet printers I can buy at the grocery store (who cares if they are junk??), Dell in the PC world, and IBM in enterprise computing. Maybe its good that both founders are gone now, so they don't have to see their once-great creation mate with Compaq.
I am personally looking forward to the creation of much smaller Parrot-based languages that truncate their syntax set and functionality to truly see how far into the realm of performance we can push VM-based languages.
Who are all union workers who are all Democrats. Their political power during a Republican administration is nonexistant.
Did you think they would rip all of this apart to save companies like VA Linux and Novell?
Remember also that the government uses Microsoft products. They have no interest in turning off what is eventually going to be their biggest IT supplier, if Microsoft is not already.
Its pure fantasy to believe that the government ever had any real notion of destroying this company...they know that Microsoft has wormed itself far too deep into American consumer life to be yanked out violently. We're just going to have to live with them until something better comes along that consumers actually spend money on.
BZZT! Walmart employs three times as many people (1.2 million compared to 380k at GM).
GM has huge revenues, (WMT is near but a little less), but WalMart and many others have vastly more income than GM. Walmart hd income of 3 billion, GM has 386 million in the last recorded quarter.
Get real folks, Microsoft is more powerful than ever. This only solidifies their empire. They are the world's most powerful corporation by a long shot, and they have almost a complete stranglehold over the consumer computing experience.
For consumers, its boiled down to two choices - AOL or Microsoft. Take your pick, everyone else is chump change at this point.
Of course most of us understand the idea of structured data. The point is there are already better ways of storing and retrieving structured data on a server, and very little compelling reason to send content-oriented data through to the web client, where presentation rules and all attempts at disintermediating presentation have fallen flat.
The "profitably" bit already shows that you're not reasonable.
No - profitability is ultimately the only viable test for any technology.
Actually, less. It solves the metaformat problem.
It does not solve the interchange problem because apps still need to know where to locate relevant information in an XML doc
A simple policy is to reject any file without a valid DOCTYPE.
As for what meaning you infer from tagged data, no standard is ever going to tell you that.
The optimized protocol will always win.
I'm not trolling, its just a fact - you're almost always better off using CSS for presentation tweaks, and PHP on the server for serious logic.
Then why not compress the other more efficient protocol and receive the proportionately larger gains?
Yet its the working definition you'll find in many articles at XML.com. Why would you presume XML serves some larger purpose?
XSL/XSLT has been around for a while now, and its user base has only been expanding.
Once again, XML.com has some very informed articles trashing XSL, and they aren't naive posts by someone who just read the WROX book. Stop by and read them.
By this, it is meant that XML allows two systems that do not share a predetermined data exchange protocol to share data.
Thats it.
Where two systems share a common predetermined protocol, it is almost always more efficient than XML.
Applications of XML to programming lang design (XSL) and other domains are largely a waste of time and won't last.
Until the terrorist threat has passed, the government is totally preoccupied and won't touch MS significantly at this point.
But its only a problem for the 10% of users who either don't use XP or IE. Frankly they can get away with shunning this market as it is a lost cause anyway - that 10% will never migrate to Microsoft tools if they haven't already.
This isn't about being a good corporate citizen - MS has never cared about that in any case (because nice guys finish last). Its about locking people into a close network of sites that support extended A/V and interactivity that joe user will drool over and pay for.
MSN will simply be another AOL, and yes, most consumers will gladly allow themselves to be locked into one of these networks.
If you think you can make money with a site as sparse as gnu.org, be my guest.
The web is a platofrm for consumer products - the geek minimalist lynx user market is so infinitesimally small that it would be idiotic for any website designer to predicate a site layout based on it.
Please point me to the part of the table standard (or even the CALS derivation that spawned it), that say you should not use tables for presentation or layout.
Thats fine if you are detailing lab study results...but this approach is inane if you are designing a site for consumers.
Major web sites work from server logs, useage stats, competitive metrics and other metrics to devise their site design.
And frankly the interest group you represent is so infinitesimally small that they would be idiots to listen to you in the first place (and they know it).