HP is a high-margins company trying to make its way on low margin products like me-too clone PCs, and printers.
Its enterprise computing division is getting hammered by Sun and IBM, and no one really considers them serious supporters of linux - their support is just another bandwagon-hopping exercise to buy some PR.
With printers selling for $39 at the grocery store, they have basically become disposable - its going to be impossible for HP to compete in this market.
We've had mature PKI technology for years now, and hardly anyone is using it outside of signing on software from forward-looking publishers in the open source world.
Honestly, when is the last time you received encrypted email resulting from a succesful key exchange with a user out there in webland?
I agree that it is time to move past Wintel, but I'm not convinced that a new or improved PC is what we need.
Computing is going mobile - you probably want to look at some cool things you can do with Palm devices or WAP phones instead of rehashing the PC. The PC has really reached its dead end and its unlikely that you have much to offer that isn't just an incremental tweak on a dead paradigm.
First you state "Americans like big cars" then "American [sic] is one of the cleanest countries in the world". Cars are one of the major sources of pollution, about 25% of total. Big cars use more fuel, need more material, bigger roads, etc. They pollute more by any standard.
This is a ridiculous generalization. How about nations that still use leaded fuel, like China? Leaded fuel is far more polluting that unleaded fuels used in industrialized nations.
As it stands, every environmental account will display quite clearly how air quality in the US has risen dramatically in the last twenty years with the advent of cleaner fuels - even cities like Los Angeles are dramatically less smoggy.
I'd say europe in general is 50-100 years ahead of the US in the ethical evolution of mankind.
Ha! What a crock of shit! Lets recount the burning of immigrant homes in Germany, or how about the inability of the major European powers to do a damn thing about the Balkan conflict? Time and time again Europeans have looked to the US to handle major humanitarian efforts. Europeans are inward looking protectionists who are more regularly xenophobic than any culture perhaps save the Japanese.
1) America has the largest tax receipts of any country in the world. Hardly a Capitalist utopia.
The United States has considerably lower tax rates than most European countries. As to how this creates larger tax revenues, investigate the Laffer Curve.
2) America spends more on its miltary than any other country in the world. What exactly does this contribute to free trade ?
What do military expenditures have to do with free trade??
3) American corporations are amongst some of the most monopalistic in the world. Is this the free market ?
Yes, it is. It is not illegal to hold persuasive market power in any industrialized nation, as long as legal means were used to obtain market power. At least the government doesn't force citizens to prop up big industry, like in Europe.
4) When forced to compete on a level playing field, US corporations fail dismally. E.g. the auto industry. You will not see ANYONE driving an Amercian car in Europe. Like most Amreicans, we would prefer a quality vehicle from BMW, Mercedez-Benz, Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda, Porshe, or even a Japanese made vehichle rather than the American low quality product.
Ha! You moron! Volvo and Saab and Jaguar are owned by American companies. Do some research! How many English automakers are still owned by the English?
5) Exploitation of resources and inefficiency. America leads the world in the destruction of the natural environment.
Wrong. China and even Canada are, on a per capita basis, more wasteful of resources.
Does anyone here really choose to use or not use a product due to a moderate price?
Being "free" hasn't exactly invigorated the BeOS scene. I doubt QNX will fair any better.
Competition in the OS market is dying rapidly, and interestingly enough, due to the natural process of standards adoption. Almost everything of interest in an OS these days is the result of implementing support for a well-known standard, from POSIX right through to HTTP and XML.
Everyone who was ticked off by ESR's belligerent essay on how-to-be-humble-even-when-you're-rich will be glad to know that he isn't! ESR is now worth $300k and change after the tax man gets done with him.
Gratuitous and ridicuous product placement
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 3
Added to which, the shot in which they panned to the computer screen had absolutely nothing to do with the greater plot or the scene they were shooting.
The number of product shots in this movie is astounding and shameful for Scott.
Once Hannibal's character was removed from the confines of prison, he really isn't interesting. The thing that made this character alluring in Manhunter and SOTL was that he was controlling everything and everyone while being locked away, which in itself is frightening - you cannot control this man by confining him.
Once Hannibal's cahracter is on the loose, who cares? He is not physically threatening, and none of his frightening attributes are enhanced by having him move around freely.
This movie had zilch suspense - ZILCH. Not once was I really on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen next - you always knew what where the movie would be in five minutes.
Sure, Gary Oldman played a neat freak, but once you've seen him once, its not that shocking. This movie is just a polished slasher film - thats it, nothing more, nothing less. None of the talents involved in this production could save a script based on a book that should have never been written.
People don't care if it tastes nearly exactly like Coke at a lower price - they want Coke. Branding matters. Microsoft is the brand in Office software. That doesn't mean OpenOffice isn't worth pursuing, but don't expect it to win over current Office users or any serious potential customers - this is going to be like most other open projects - by linux users for linux users.
Marx defended the idea of the working class, but he held great contempt for the workers themselves. He synthesized statistics, rarely visited real workplaces, and spent a great deal of his life loafing on the sofa, sponging money from his friends and leaving his family to starve.
There is a substantial amount of data to conclude that the United States knew an attack was coming, but let it proceed in order to galvanize pro-war opinion in a country that wanted nothing to do with a conflict across an ocean.
2: The Nazis Invade Russia
The Nazis Invade France
The United States was not involved directly in combat when either of these conflicts took place. In fact, there was a substantial pro-German constituency in the United States when the invasion of France was launched.
C/C++ will not make it in the long run. It's Java or C#
Bullshit. C will still be in use when you are on your deathbed. Java will still be looking for an excuse to exist despite hype and funding from Sun. C# Will probably be a distant memory.
A number of wireless alternatives coming on the market now are line-of-sight. Starband and Sprint do require clear access to the satellite (not as trivial as you think - installation folks told me that in urban areas a substantial number of locations cannot recieve the signal).
I think it would behoove you to do some research on the system I am discussing - it has been used succesfully in trials to transmit in the gigabit range.
Wireless doesn't need to work like cell phones. Surely your own company has been involved in the trials of shooting light over the open air. Its optical without the fiber, and its in development right now, and it refutes all of your spectrum arguments.
Cable TV was the last great wiring build-out to consumers - no one is taking on that cost ever again. The last mile will be wireless.
The authors of this article fail to address the obvious issue of the ongoing build-outs of fiber networks -the imminent oversupply of fiber.
In a bandwidth-starved world it seems odd to think that there is a glut of fiber, but the very soon will be if there already isn't.
If all of the fiber in the ground right now was lit, the cost of transmission would effectively drop to zero - its just a matter of who can ride out the inevitable shakeout in the market and consolidate the networks of the ones that can't compete. In the mide-term, consumers could actually see reduced capacity as the market consolidates.
No company or group of companies can afford such capital outlay in today's short-term obsessed stock market. Investors would severely punish any stock that hedged its profits on a infrastructure plan that would take at least a decade to pay off.
The days of home-installed telco equipment are coming to an end. It is expensive and problematic for telco companies to maintain equipment in consumers homes, be it for phone or data. Added to which, rapidly changing standards prohibit any telco from dedicating any strategy to any particular technology. Consider the current state of optical computing - SONET is currently the main standard, but probably on the way out in the next few years. Hence no telco is going to roll out a SONET network to consumers homes because much of the equipment driving the network will become obsolete.
The better approach for voice and data is wireless. Not only does this allow location independence, but it also allows the telco to avoid the costly business of maintaining the line into the consumer's home.
Unfortunately Linux is emerging onto the platform scene when there is already a significant surplus of better-supported options. NT,
Solaris, AIX, etc...
Your analogy is flawed - linux was and is fundamentally different than NT and Solaris - in that it is both free and open source.
Ruby, Perl and Python are all free and open, which levels the playing field considerably. Added to which, languages are not OSs - library support is extremely important.
Unfortunately Ruby is emerging onto the development scene when there is already a significant surplus of better-supported options. Perl, Python, Java, etc. all have more mindshare and support, regardless of Ruby's supposed superiority at the language level.
Added to which, don't discount the value of libraries. One of the biggest draws of perl is CPAN - you can literally find a module to do nearly anything you want. I don't see Ruby bridging this important gap anytime soon.
No search engine can work on a system of shared trust. A trust web can only be applied to smallish (in the hundreds) groups of publishers. Spiders hoping to index the entire web must take each page at face value, and hence are still spoofable.
Does your system support all the popular multimedia formats with viewing/authoring software?
Does your platform support the latest browser technology? (read: does your platform support IE?)
Does your platform support the most popular user-applications?
Granted, there are many applications that are available for AIX that are not available for OSX, but these are in extremely vertical markets (where AIX should prosper anyway - it is not meant as a consumer product).
Slashdot Mirror
Its enterprise computing division is getting hammered by Sun and IBM, and no one really considers them serious supporters of linux - their support is just another bandwagon-hopping exercise to buy some PR.
With printers selling for $39 at the grocery store, they have basically become disposable - its going to be impossible for HP to compete in this market.
Honestly, when is the last time you received encrypted email resulting from a succesful key exchange with a user out there in webland?
Computing is going mobile - you probably want to look at some cool things you can do with Palm devices or WAP phones instead of rehashing the PC. The PC has really reached its dead end and its unlikely that you have much to offer that isn't just an incremental tweak on a dead paradigm.
This is a ridiculous generalization. How about nations that still use leaded fuel, like China? Leaded fuel is far more polluting that unleaded fuels used in industrialized nations.
As it stands, every environmental account will display quite clearly how air quality in the US has risen dramatically in the last twenty years with the advent of cleaner fuels - even cities like Los Angeles are dramatically less smoggy.
I'd say europe in general is 50-100 years ahead of the US in the ethical evolution of mankind.
Ha! What a crock of shit! Lets recount the burning of immigrant homes in Germany, or how about the inability of the major European powers to do a damn thing about the Balkan conflict? Time and time again Europeans have looked to the US to handle major humanitarian efforts. Europeans are inward looking protectionists who are more regularly xenophobic than any culture perhaps save the Japanese.
The United States has considerably lower tax rates than most European countries. As to how this creates larger tax revenues, investigate the Laffer Curve.
2) America spends more on its miltary than any other country in the world. What exactly does this contribute to free trade ?
What do military expenditures have to do with free trade??
3) American corporations are amongst some of the most monopalistic in the world. Is this the free market ?
Yes, it is. It is not illegal to hold persuasive market power in any industrialized nation, as long as legal means were used to obtain market power. At least the government doesn't force citizens to prop up big industry, like in Europe.
4) When forced to compete on a level playing field, US corporations fail dismally. E.g. the auto industry. You will not see ANYONE driving an Amercian car in Europe. Like most Amreicans, we would prefer a quality vehicle from BMW, Mercedez-Benz, Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda, Porshe, or even a Japanese made vehichle rather than the American low quality product.
Ha! You moron! Volvo and Saab and Jaguar are owned by American companies. Do some research! How many English automakers are still owned by the English?
5) Exploitation of resources and inefficiency. America leads the world in the destruction of the natural environment.
Wrong. China and even Canada are, on a per capita basis, more wasteful of resources.
Being "free" hasn't exactly invigorated the BeOS scene. I doubt QNX will fair any better.
Competition in the OS market is dying rapidly, and interestingly enough, due to the natural process of standards adoption. Almost everything of interest in an OS these days is the result of implementing support for a well-known standard, from POSIX right through to HTTP and XML.
Everyone who was ticked off by ESR's belligerent essay on how-to-be-humble-even-when-you're-rich will be glad to know that he isn't! ESR is now worth $300k and change after the tax man gets done with him.
The number of product shots in this movie is astounding and shameful for Scott.
Once Hannibal's character was removed from the confines of prison, he really isn't interesting. The thing that made this character alluring in Manhunter and SOTL was that he was controlling everything and everyone while being locked away, which in itself is frightening - you cannot control this man by confining him.
Once Hannibal's cahracter is on the loose, who cares? He is not physically threatening, and none of his frightening attributes are enhanced by having him move around freely.
This movie had zilch suspense - ZILCH. Not once was I really on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen next - you always knew what where the movie would be in five minutes.
Sure, Gary Oldman played a neat freak, but once you've seen him once, its not that shocking. This movie is just a polished slasher film - thats it, nothing more, nothing less. None of the talents involved in this production could save a script based on a book that should have never been written.
People don't care if it tastes nearly exactly like Coke at a lower price - they want Coke. Branding matters. Microsoft is the brand in Office software. That doesn't mean OpenOffice isn't worth pursuing, but don't expect it to win over current Office users or any serious potential customers - this is going to be like most other open projects - by linux users for linux users.
Marx defended the idea of the working class, but he held great contempt for the workers themselves. He synthesized statistics, rarely visited real workplaces, and spent a great deal of his life loafing on the sofa, sponging money from his friends and leaving his family to starve.
There is a substantial amount of data to conclude that the United States knew an attack was coming, but let it proceed in order to galvanize pro-war opinion in a country that wanted nothing to do with a conflict across an ocean.
2: The Nazis Invade Russia
The Nazis Invade France
The United States was not involved directly in combat when either of these conflicts took place. In fact, there was a substantial pro-German constituency in the United States when the invasion of France was launched.
Bullshit. C will still be in use when you are on your deathbed. Java will still be looking for an excuse to exist despite hype and funding from Sun. C# Will probably be a distant memory.
I think it would behoove you to do some research on the system I am discussing - it has been used succesfully in trials to transmit in the gigabit range.
Cable TV was the last great wiring build-out to consumers - no one is taking on that cost ever again. The last mile will be wireless.
Unless there is a major telco behind this, or another form of long term capital, this cannot take off.
In a bandwidth-starved world it seems odd to think that there is a glut of fiber, but the very soon will be if there already isn't.
If all of the fiber in the ground right now was lit, the cost of transmission would effectively drop to zero - its just a matter of who can ride out the inevitable shakeout in the market and consolidate the networks of the ones that can't compete. In the mide-term, consumers could actually see reduced capacity as the market consolidates.
The days of home-installed telco equipment are coming to an end. It is expensive and problematic for telco companies to maintain equipment in consumers homes, be it for phone or data. Added to which, rapidly changing standards prohibit any telco from dedicating any strategy to any particular technology. Consider the current state of optical computing - SONET is currently the main standard, but probably on the way out in the next few years. Hence no telco is going to roll out a SONET network to consumers homes because much of the equipment driving the network will become obsolete.
The better approach for voice and data is wireless. Not only does this allow location independence, but it also allows the telco to avoid the costly business of maintaining the line into the consumer's home.
But if you're going to play "shoot the messenger", why not sue TW cable for viruses that pass over its lines?
Your analogy is flawed - linux was and is fundamentally different than NT and Solaris - in that it is both free and open source.
Ruby, Perl and Python are all free and open, which levels the playing field considerably. Added to which, languages are not OSs - library support is extremely important.
No government that approves the merger of AOL and Time Warner can possibly propose the breakup of Micorosft.
Added to which, don't discount the value of libraries. One of the biggest draws of perl is CPAN - you can literally find a module to do nearly anything you want. I don't see Ruby bridging this important gap anytime soon.
No search engine can work on a system of shared trust. A trust web can only be applied to smallish (in the hundreds) groups of publishers. Spiders hoping to index the entire web must take each page at face value, and hence are still spoofable.
As it stands, BeOS itself had a rather crude interface and zilch support for modern useful software like...browsers and word processors.
Does your platform support the latest browser technology? (read: does your platform support IE?)
Does your platform support the most popular user-applications?
Granted, there are many applications that are available for AIX that are not available for OSX, but these are in extremely vertical markets (where AIX should prosper anyway - it is not meant as a consumer product).