On the other hand, a single mega corp like GM, dying from the head downward though it may be, probably represents a market of roughly equal magnitude to all the 30- person businesses in the country.
What's the statistic, 60% of the GDP comes from small businesses? The strength of the American economy is in small companies with less than 20 employees. Oracle can't make much money off these guys though because they don't *need* the massive scalablility (or pricetag) of Oracle. Small companies just aren't Oracle's market, so of course they don't care about them.
Yeah, except unregulated markets tend to concentrate to the point where the market isn't really driving change, it's the two or three major players on the top who are. When a market is mature there's not a whole lot of room for new players, especially for stuff like infrastructure where the entry cost is prohibitive.
When the market is controlled by the demand side everything is peachy, but when the supply side starts to gain control it no longer is a free market; it is a monopoly (or oligopoly.) The top players can't legally work together to shut out competition, but big, profitable companies tend to be predictable to the point they don't really have to.
So the newspapers go away, and the reporters get jobs where the market needs them, not where the market has traditionally had them. That's how it's supposed to work.
Your business model will not be viable forever. Figure out how to make it work or someone else will.
Acid2 is great, but standards/tests are only worth something if anyone cares. IE6 and Firefox both fail miserably, but web developers tune their sites to IE6 and Firefox. I find Camino to be more real-world-compatible than Safari for a lot of sites that have been tweaked to support Firefox and IE. Safari's JavaScript support is also lackluster (periodically onClicks/onSubmits just never get passed; this breaks quite a few AJAX pages.)
This is just from an end-user's perspective, but my mother (a 5th grade teacher who just discovered PowerPoint) perfers Camino as well, because stuff like her online banking and school district intranet browser doesn't work in Safari. Safari may be compatible with 99% of the pages out there but it's the last 1% of custom applications that probably won't be updated that kills it for me.
The only downside of Camino that I see is the Firefox plugin situation, which really isn't that bad because they don't work with Safari anyway.
I don't use Safari because it doesn't render pages as well as a mozilla based browser, and now I have a reason to gloat:)
Get Camino here. Camino is an OS X native browser using the gecko rendering engine. Looks better than Safari, is faster than Safari, and apparently is more secure than Safari. Plus the security is more easily tunable.
Most Mac users have heard of it by now, but I'm just giving them another plug because it kicks ass.
That's the point of all this, to close the "analog hole." Content from the drive is sent encrypted to the driver (not that hard to do, you can encrypt a filesystem for the same effect,) which decrypts it, then re-encrypts it with a different key, which sends it to the video driver, which decrypts and encrypts with yet another key, which sends the signal to the monitor (here's where the HDCP part comes in) to a display device which can decrypt the stream and display it on the device.
I agree with you on the content protection being useless part though. All the processes in the above paragraph assume you can keep encryption keys that are intended to be widely distributed secret. You can't distribute something as widely as home electronics and have anything about them remain a secret. Only once these things can be network enabled will content protection get particularly nasty (places have tried to do this with streaming content, but the bandwidth just isn't there yet. 10 or 15 years from now though...)
I wonder whether DRM is even worth it from a business standpoint. Yes, CEOs/Boards want to protect their content, but at what cost? Millions of dollars and 5-10 years developing DRM standards that can be defeated by a teenager in a month? Lawsuits? And all this time, the professional piracy rings who REALLY cost these industries money are wholly unaffected? Money is not lost via piracy over the internet (crappy quality videos which get watched and deleted,) money is lost when 500,000 copies of Harry Potter are printed (complete with jacket and inserts) in a warehouse in China or Korea and sold on eBay (real DVDs equivalent to the store bought ones.)
MS has made different versions of Office for years. Office Home, Office Pro, Office Small Business Management Edition, etc. Most of these are just different bundles of the office programs (Home is Excel, Word and PowerPoint, Pro includes Access and Outlook, SBME includes MS Project and some sharepoint integration stuff.)
IMO all this does is reduce code bloat. The SharePoint integration features might be useful to someone on a corporate LAN but totally useless to anyone else. Just be thankful they don't sell only the One True Office or something for $1000 when all you need are Word and PowerPoint. I don't think the individual applications really differ all that much other than extension bundles (advanced math addons for excel, etc.)
Let's not pretend that oil companies don't know exactly how much oil is in the ground. They don't tell us because if they did, people would fucking flip out and *really* start looking into alternative fuels (i.e. it would become a national security issue of the highest magnitude instead of something associated with hippies and women who don't shave.) They also know that "magic number" that people are willing to pay for gas, and will incrementally edge it up so not to shock the market into running towards alternatives. There is absolutely no downward pressure on oil prices so prices will never come back in check.
I think they know that the supply of oil is limited, and by extension, so is the amount of money they can make. But by slowly curtailing the production of oil, they can let the price slowly skyrocket and maximize the amount of money they make off the remaining oil in the ground. Yes, this is short sighted and ultimately damaging to humanity, but at this point we're pretty much screwed anyway, so why not try and make a few bucks off it?
Occams razor (sic) is again misused by someone trying to sound smart. It has no concept of deception, and thus applies well to certain things like metaphysics which, if they are correct, can't be any other way than they appear (things which are true by their very nature.) Even then it's just a slightly-better-than-random guess. People really get in trouble when applying it to anything involving human intention/action, where it really has no meaning at all.
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
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· Score: 1
If you don't enjoy spending hours setting up a distro and installing MythTV, use a prerolled PVR distro like KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth is integrated with the MythTV development process and includes current drivers for many tuner cards that aren't supported in the default kernel. It will also download and install NVidia drivers, basically everything except libdvdcss (for obvious reasons; but you can download and compile it yourself easily.)
The KnoppMyth installer assumes you're installing to an IDE hard drive though. You may have to get in and tweak the fstab after installation on SATA. I've been using KnoppMyth for about 6 months though, and it is very nice, easy to install, and comes with all the bells and whistles already configured.
Lasik is pretty mature. It and its predecessor, RK (lasik with knives,) have been around for about 25 years. They can get most people to better than 20/20 vision, and even if your vision is really bad, they can get you close enough that you probably won't have to wear glasses.
Welcome to 2 years ago. The Athlon 64 is the best desktop chip available.
But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market. It's starting to shape up as AMD = desktops and servers; Intel = compact desktops (iMac) and laptops.
The only reason Intel has a presence in the desktop market is Dell. Just wait until Dell gives in; AMD is currently building their new corporate HQ in Austin about 10 miles down the freeway from Dell's in Round Rock (RR is a suburb of Austin.) It's only a matter of time.
Unfortunately the patent landscape is such now that if your employer doesn't patent your creations, someone else might. If your product is successful, you end up with something like the Blackberry debacle. Filing shitloads of patents is now a cover-your-ass move. You can't rely on the PTO to sort things out, so you have to patent EVERYTHING of value.
If you would RTFA (I know, it's slashdot tradition to post w/o reading) then you would see he actually offers an explanation to these claims. He's not claiming a bug; rather he claims that it is a design flaw that under certain circumstances, can write invalid data to your system or allow a backdoor into kernel memory. I would say this falls more under the heading of something like the Sony DRM rootkit.
Even if he's wrong, I don't think this is libel because the internet (especially blogs) is a discussion forum. Mistakes can be corrected, and I think in this case it probably would have benefitted StarForce to try and talk to the guy and tell him he is wrong as opposed to going to the lawyers at the first sight of trouble. There's no way StarForce can claim harassment if they never tried to correct the guy.
Yeah but they pay the same $15/mo as someone who plays less. I'd think keeping the rest of the people interested would be better than catering to a vocal minority...
The gold selling ads are from AdWords. One of the few profitable businesses built around WoW (other than selling boxed copies of the game itself) is selling gold. Gold probably has a higher profit margin than selling the game. So obviously gold sellers are going to pay the most for the keyword "World of Warcraft." It sucks, but these guys have to pay for hosting somehow.
Preventing gold selling in an MMO is next to impossible anyway, and WoW is far better at mitigating its effects than any other MMO I've played. By comparison, FFXI's economy was totally screwed after about 6 months (over 1,000,000 gil for midlevel items? yah right.) WoW is over a year old and prices haven't jumped more than 25% since launch, except for certain specific items made more desirable by changes in the game mechanics.
Yatlas is actually a nice replacement for the default map screen. Bonus is it's smaller so you can actually see/control your character while looking at the map.
I like them. Elite dungeion quests are very fun and many can be accomplished easily if you're in a small guild. However, anything beyond Molten Core in WoW is just way too much work for the average person with a job, friends or a girlfriend. No matter what the designers say, Blackwing Lair is inaccessible to all but the top 3-5% on every server.
A lot of people are becoming disallusioned with WoW because of this, myself included. A new 40 man dungeon that's harder than anything in the game? Why not expend all the energy it takes to make this content that 5% of your customers will play making content that, say, 50% could enjoy?
I understand they have to create a carrot to keep people chasing. That's ok. Just don't put the carrot on a stick that's a mile long, cause a lot of us just aren't gonna chase it.
It's why I'm not renewing my account after this month, and why many others I know are doing the same. WoW promised to be the MMO for people who didn't want to live MMOs, and that experience ends once you hit lv 60. After level 60, it becomes a job, and I already have one of those that pays me a lot more than WoW.
Oh come on, if you go on Howard Stern and you don't expect to answer those kind of questions, well, you've never listened to Howard Stern before:P 50% of his guests are strippers who he has on the show pretty much just to watch them have sex in his studio. He's a dirty old man, though that's a large part of his appeal.
I have a meager MythTV box that I built out of $800 worth of parts and some stuff I had lying around, and it specs out about the same as this guy's. CPU is a bit slower and I only have 5 tuners (3 regular, 2 digital cable) but I have a TB of disk space (is that even impressive anymore?) and it records everything I've ever wanted.
I've also had this setup for 6 to 9 months. Do I get a slashdot article on me? This is just some guy dropping way too much money on an overpowered CPU (I use an Athlon 64 3500+ and have never, ever had speed problems, even when transcoding 2 shows at once and watching another.)
They are. You're supposed to call the telco before digging more than a foot underground. Very few people actually do, and in some states it is against the law to dig without calling. But in the end it's got to be up to the contractors to make the phone call before they dig, and very few do because of tight schedules. 99/100 times this is not really a problem, but when it is a problem, it's a big one.
Re:kinda crap but makes sense in the UK
on
Supermarket VOIP
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· Score: 2, Informative
The USA has free local calls, and most providers throw in free domestic long distance as well now. For $99 a month you can get the whole package, broadband, telephone service with all the bells and whistles (caller ID, 3 way, voice mail, free LD, etc.) and television service. All the major cable companies and telcos offer it.
Here, like most of Europe, however, its all changing to cell phones. I dont know anybody who still owns a landline. All cell phones in the US include free domestic LD. Many people have cell phones from other cities (personally I have a Houston number but live in Austin. Got the number when I lived in Houston and didnt want to change.)
Everyone forgets, but Apple has had a smooth transition between architectures before. They moved from the Motorola M680X0 architecture to the PowerPC by using mixed binaries, and had very few problems. There were some initial growing pains (extensions that would bomb the system, etc,) but by and large the transition went smoothly.
And that was on System 7; OS X is a much more portable operating system. A simple recompile is all that's necessary for most programs without a lot of assembler optimization.
They'll maintain differentiation with case design. Don't expect Apple to ship ATX systems; they moved to Intel because laptops are quickly becoming the standard, not desktops. Every laptop manufacturer uses custom designs anyway, and the IBM chips were really designed for servers and workstations (the POWER line at least,) not laptops.
One bonus is that they no longer have to emulate the x86 to do windows emulation, just translate the APIs. Apple has also written stuff like this before; with Classic mode on OS X. In 2 or 3 years I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows.exes run under OS X as if they were native applications.
Apple has their foot in the door of consumers' wallets/minds with the iPod. Now that everyone and their mother (literally) has an iPod, they'll be more open to purchasing a Mac as their next computer. With users becoming increasingly fed up with viruses and spyware, Macs are a very attractive option to many people. Once the price comes down a little bit (which I suspect it will once they ramp up full scale production on Intel) I see nothing but good things for Apple.
The internet is everything to everyone, and thus an ideal place to advertise, but you've got to be targeted so you don't waste ad money showing advertisements for magnum condoms to lesbians or 8 year olds or something. Google AdWords is really the best service for doing this at a low cost.
Tracking information is valuable because marketroids have wanted this kind of power for a long time. Why do you think grocery stores invented "discount cards?" They give you an incentive to use the card (discounts) and thus they can track all your purchases and sell that information to direct mail marketers (they get your address when you sign up for the card, after all.) It's all an effort to single out their customers.
So does Google, only in a different way. Through GMail they also have a "social network map" via the invite system. They give you more invites than you can ever use in hopes that it will still seem a little "exclusive" and you'll invite your friends, thus they get to see which free mail services they're taking customers from and who is friends with who.
The computer industry is especially saddled with this requirement because it's so easy to just dump it all directly into a database and search it. For normal stuff you have to hire data entry people, but when the end users do all the data entry themselves, all you have to do is write a program that aggregates their info into a database. You basically get business value (information) at little to no cost other than the up-front backend programming. Growing value (as the databases always grow) at a small upfront cost is a managers wet dream.
Google for DVDShrink and I think you'll find a pretty easy way to do it and remove the encryption. Then you can bit copy your "doctored" one and make a perfect copy that will have no encryption, no macrovision.
On the contrary; it's one of my favorite shows and I have the first 2 and a half seasons sitting on my MythTV box. It's one of the few I make a point to watch every week (along with The Boondocks, which is probably the funniest show on TV right now.) I have to say the third season seems more disjointed than the first two, but it's enjoyable nonetheless. If you like action anime and can handle a show that expects you to think, SAC is the show for you.
I don't disagree with you about the "article," but spammers are finding it increasingly difficult to get messages past spam filters to people who are ultimately less receptive to it anyway. My SpamAssassin filters block out probably 4-5000 messages a day and maybe 5 or 6 a day get through and are just deleted by the end user. With this level of effectiveness from such a commonly used filtering setup, it wouldn't surprise me if the volume of spam started decreasing because people no longer see it as an effective marketing tool.
Google AdWords is basically just as cheap and reaches a much more targeted (while still enormous) audience. AdWords also has the benefit of not pissing off your customers by flooding their inboxes with crap. Not astroturfing or anything, but if I was going to spend $100 on advertising, I think AdWords would be a better use of my money than spam.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, a single mega corp like GM, dying from the head downward though it may be, probably represents a market of roughly equal magnitude to all the 30- person businesses in the country.
What's the statistic, 60% of the GDP comes from small businesses? The strength of the American economy is in small companies with less than 20 employees. Oracle can't make much money off these guys though because they don't *need* the massive scalablility (or pricetag) of Oracle. Small companies just aren't Oracle's market, so of course they don't care about them.
Yeah, except unregulated markets tend to concentrate to the point where the market isn't really driving change, it's the two or three major players on the top who are. When a market is mature there's not a whole lot of room for new players, especially for stuff like infrastructure where the entry cost is prohibitive.
When the market is controlled by the demand side everything is peachy, but when the supply side starts to gain control it no longer is a free market; it is a monopoly (or oligopoly.) The top players can't legally work together to shut out competition, but big, profitable companies tend to be predictable to the point they don't really have to.
So the newspapers go away, and the reporters get jobs where the market needs them, not where the market has traditionally had them. That's how it's supposed to work.
Your business model will not be viable forever. Figure out how to make it work or someone else will.
Acid2 is great, but standards/tests are only worth something if anyone cares. IE6 and Firefox both fail miserably, but web developers tune their sites to IE6 and Firefox. I find Camino to be more real-world-compatible than Safari for a lot of sites that have been tweaked to support Firefox and IE. Safari's JavaScript support is also lackluster (periodically onClicks/onSubmits just never get passed; this breaks quite a few AJAX pages.)
This is just from an end-user's perspective, but my mother (a 5th grade teacher who just discovered PowerPoint) perfers Camino as well, because stuff like her online banking and school district intranet browser doesn't work in Safari. Safari may be compatible with 99% of the pages out there but it's the last 1% of custom applications that probably won't be updated that kills it for me.
The only downside of Camino that I see is the Firefox plugin situation, which really isn't that bad because they don't work with Safari anyway.
I don't use Safari because it doesn't render pages as well as a mozilla based browser, and now I have a reason to gloat :)
Get Camino here. Camino is an OS X native browser using the gecko rendering engine. Looks better than Safari, is faster than Safari, and apparently is more secure than Safari. Plus the security is more easily tunable.
Most Mac users have heard of it by now, but I'm just giving them another plug because it kicks ass.
That's the point of all this, to close the "analog hole." Content from the drive is sent encrypted to the driver (not that hard to do, you can encrypt a filesystem for the same effect,) which decrypts it, then re-encrypts it with a different key, which sends it to the video driver, which decrypts and encrypts with yet another key, which sends the signal to the monitor (here's where the HDCP part comes in) to a display device which can decrypt the stream and display it on the device.
I agree with you on the content protection being useless part though. All the processes in the above paragraph assume you can keep encryption keys that are intended to be widely distributed secret. You can't distribute something as widely as home electronics and have anything about them remain a secret. Only once these things can be network enabled will content protection get particularly nasty (places have tried to do this with streaming content, but the bandwidth just isn't there yet. 10 or 15 years from now though...)
I wonder whether DRM is even worth it from a business standpoint. Yes, CEOs/Boards want to protect their content, but at what cost? Millions of dollars and 5-10 years developing DRM standards that can be defeated by a teenager in a month? Lawsuits? And all this time, the professional piracy rings who REALLY cost these industries money are wholly unaffected? Money is not lost via piracy over the internet (crappy quality videos which get watched and deleted,) money is lost when 500,000 copies of Harry Potter are printed (complete with jacket and inserts) in a warehouse in China or Korea and sold on eBay (real DVDs equivalent to the store bought ones.)
MS has made different versions of Office for years. Office Home, Office Pro, Office Small Business Management Edition, etc. Most of these are just different bundles of the office programs (Home is Excel, Word and PowerPoint, Pro includes Access and Outlook, SBME includes MS Project and some sharepoint integration stuff.)
IMO all this does is reduce code bloat. The SharePoint integration features might be useful to someone on a corporate LAN but totally useless to anyone else. Just be thankful they don't sell only the One True Office or something for $1000 when all you need are Word and PowerPoint. I don't think the individual applications really differ all that much other than extension bundles (advanced math addons for excel, etc.)
Let's not pretend that oil companies don't know exactly how much oil is in the ground. They don't tell us because if they did, people would fucking flip out and *really* start looking into alternative fuels (i.e. it would become a national security issue of the highest magnitude instead of something associated with hippies and women who don't shave.) They also know that "magic number" that people are willing to pay for gas, and will incrementally edge it up so not to shock the market into running towards alternatives. There is absolutely no downward pressure on oil prices so prices will never come back in check.
I think they know that the supply of oil is limited, and by extension, so is the amount of money they can make. But by slowly curtailing the production of oil, they can let the price slowly skyrocket and maximize the amount of money they make off the remaining oil in the ground. Yes, this is short sighted and ultimately damaging to humanity, but at this point we're pretty much screwed anyway, so why not try and make a few bucks off it?
Occams razor (sic) is again misused by someone trying to sound smart. It has no concept of deception, and thus applies well to certain things like metaphysics which, if they are correct, can't be any other way than they appear (things which are true by their very nature.) Even then it's just a slightly-better-than-random guess. People really get in trouble when applying it to anything involving human intention/action, where it really has no meaning at all.
If you don't enjoy spending hours setting up a distro and installing MythTV, use a prerolled PVR distro like KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth is integrated with the MythTV development process and includes current drivers for many tuner cards that aren't supported in the default kernel. It will also download and install NVidia drivers, basically everything except libdvdcss (for obvious reasons; but you can download and compile it yourself easily.)
The KnoppMyth installer assumes you're installing to an IDE hard drive though. You may have to get in and tweak the fstab after installation on SATA. I've been using KnoppMyth for about 6 months though, and it is very nice, easy to install, and comes with all the bells and whistles already configured.
Lasik is pretty mature. It and its predecessor, RK (lasik with knives,) have been around for about 25 years. They can get most people to better than 20/20 vision, and even if your vision is really bad, they can get you close enough that you probably won't have to wear glasses.
Welcome to 2 years ago. The Athlon 64 is the best desktop chip available.
But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market. It's starting to shape up as AMD = desktops and servers; Intel = compact desktops (iMac) and laptops.
The only reason Intel has a presence in the desktop market is Dell. Just wait until Dell gives in; AMD is currently building their new corporate HQ in Austin about 10 miles down the freeway from Dell's in Round Rock (RR is a suburb of Austin.) It's only a matter of time.
Unfortunately the patent landscape is such now that if your employer doesn't patent your creations, someone else might. If your product is successful, you end up with something like the Blackberry debacle. Filing shitloads of patents is now a cover-your-ass move. You can't rely on the PTO to sort things out, so you have to patent EVERYTHING of value.
If you would RTFA (I know, it's slashdot tradition to post w/o reading) then you would see he actually offers an explanation to these claims. He's not claiming a bug; rather he claims that it is a design flaw that under certain circumstances, can write invalid data to your system or allow a backdoor into kernel memory. I would say this falls more under the heading of something like the Sony DRM rootkit.
Even if he's wrong, I don't think this is libel because the internet (especially blogs) is a discussion forum. Mistakes can be corrected, and I think in this case it probably would have benefitted StarForce to try and talk to the guy and tell him he is wrong as opposed to going to the lawyers at the first sight of trouble. There's no way StarForce can claim harassment if they never tried to correct the guy.
Yeah but they pay the same $15/mo as someone who plays less. I'd think keeping the rest of the people interested would be better than catering to a vocal minority...
The gold selling ads are from AdWords. One of the few profitable businesses built around WoW (other than selling boxed copies of the game itself) is selling gold. Gold probably has a higher profit margin than selling the game. So obviously gold sellers are going to pay the most for the keyword "World of Warcraft." It sucks, but these guys have to pay for hosting somehow.
Preventing gold selling in an MMO is next to impossible anyway, and WoW is far better at mitigating its effects than any other MMO I've played. By comparison, FFXI's economy was totally screwed after about 6 months (over 1,000,000 gil for midlevel items? yah right.) WoW is over a year old and prices haven't jumped more than 25% since launch, except for certain specific items made more desirable by changes in the game mechanics.
Yatlas is actually a nice replacement for the default map screen. Bonus is it's smaller so you can actually see/control your character while looking at the map.
I like them. Elite dungeion quests are very fun and many can be accomplished easily if you're in a small guild. However, anything beyond Molten Core in WoW is just way too much work for the average person with a job, friends or a girlfriend. No matter what the designers say, Blackwing Lair is inaccessible to all but the top 3-5% on every server.
A lot of people are becoming disallusioned with WoW because of this, myself included. A new 40 man dungeon that's harder than anything in the game? Why not expend all the energy it takes to make this content that 5% of your customers will play making content that, say, 50% could enjoy?
I understand they have to create a carrot to keep people chasing. That's ok. Just don't put the carrot on a stick that's a mile long, cause a lot of us just aren't gonna chase it.
It's why I'm not renewing my account after this month, and why many others I know are doing the same. WoW promised to be the MMO for people who didn't want to live MMOs, and that experience ends once you hit lv 60. After level 60, it becomes a job, and I already have one of those that pays me a lot more than WoW.
Oh come on, if you go on Howard Stern and you don't expect to answer those kind of questions, well, you've never listened to Howard Stern before :P 50% of his guests are strippers who he has on the show pretty much just to watch them have sex in his studio. He's a dirty old man, though that's a large part of his appeal.
I have a meager MythTV box that I built out of $800 worth of parts and some stuff I had lying around, and it specs out about the same as this guy's. CPU is a bit slower and I only have 5 tuners (3 regular, 2 digital cable) but I have a TB of disk space (is that even impressive anymore?) and it records everything I've ever wanted.
I've also had this setup for 6 to 9 months. Do I get a slashdot article on me? This is just some guy dropping way too much money on an overpowered CPU (I use an Athlon 64 3500+ and have never, ever had speed problems, even when transcoding 2 shows at once and watching another.)
They are. You're supposed to call the telco before digging more than a foot underground. Very few people actually do, and in some states it is against the law to dig without calling. But in the end it's got to be up to the contractors to make the phone call before they dig, and very few do because of tight schedules. 99/100 times this is not really a problem, but when it is a problem, it's a big one.
The USA has free local calls, and most providers throw in free domestic long distance as well now. For $99 a month you can get the whole package, broadband, telephone service with all the bells and whistles (caller ID, 3 way, voice mail, free LD, etc.) and television service. All the major cable companies and telcos offer it.
Here, like most of Europe, however, its all changing to cell phones. I dont know anybody who still owns a landline. All cell phones in the US include free domestic LD. Many people have cell phones from other cities (personally I have a Houston number but live in Austin. Got the number when I lived in Houston and didnt want to change.)
Everyone forgets, but Apple has had a smooth transition between architectures before. They moved from the Motorola M680X0 architecture to the PowerPC by using mixed binaries, and had very few problems. There were some initial growing pains (extensions that would bomb the system, etc,) but by and large the transition went smoothly.
.exes run under OS X as if they were native applications.
And that was on System 7; OS X is a much more portable operating system. A simple recompile is all that's necessary for most programs without a lot of assembler optimization.
They'll maintain differentiation with case design. Don't expect Apple to ship ATX systems; they moved to Intel because laptops are quickly becoming the standard, not desktops. Every laptop manufacturer uses custom designs anyway, and the IBM chips were really designed for servers and workstations (the POWER line at least,) not laptops.
One bonus is that they no longer have to emulate the x86 to do windows emulation, just translate the APIs. Apple has also written stuff like this before; with Classic mode on OS X. In 2 or 3 years I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows
Apple has their foot in the door of consumers' wallets/minds with the iPod. Now that everyone and their mother (literally) has an iPod, they'll be more open to purchasing a Mac as their next computer. With users becoming increasingly fed up with viruses and spyware, Macs are a very attractive option to many people. Once the price comes down a little bit (which I suspect it will once they ramp up full scale production on Intel) I see nothing but good things for Apple.
The internet is everything to everyone, and thus an ideal place to advertise, but you've got to be targeted so you don't waste ad money showing advertisements for magnum condoms to lesbians or 8 year olds or something. Google AdWords is really the best service for doing this at a low cost.
Tracking information is valuable because marketroids have wanted this kind of power for a long time. Why do you think grocery stores invented "discount cards?" They give you an incentive to use the card (discounts) and thus they can track all your purchases and sell that information to direct mail marketers (they get your address when you sign up for the card, after all.) It's all an effort to single out their customers.
So does Google, only in a different way. Through GMail they also have a "social network map" via the invite system. They give you more invites than you can ever use in hopes that it will still seem a little "exclusive" and you'll invite your friends, thus they get to see which free mail services they're taking customers from and who is friends with who.
The computer industry is especially saddled with this requirement because it's so easy to just dump it all directly into a database and search it. For normal stuff you have to hire data entry people, but when the end users do all the data entry themselves, all you have to do is write a program that aggregates their info into a database. You basically get business value (information) at little to no cost other than the up-front backend programming. Growing value (as the databases always grow) at a small upfront cost is a managers wet dream.
Google for DVDShrink and I think you'll find a pretty easy way to do it and remove the encryption. Then you can bit copy your "doctored" one and make a perfect copy that will have no encryption, no macrovision.
On the contrary; it's one of my favorite shows and I have the first 2 and a half seasons sitting on my MythTV box. It's one of the few I make a point to watch every week (along with The Boondocks, which is probably the funniest show on TV right now.) I have to say the third season seems more disjointed than the first two, but it's enjoyable nonetheless. If you like action anime and can handle a show that expects you to think, SAC is the show for you.
I don't disagree with you about the "article," but spammers are finding it increasingly difficult to get messages past spam filters to people who are ultimately less receptive to it anyway. My SpamAssassin filters block out probably 4-5000 messages a day and maybe 5 or 6 a day get through and are just deleted by the end user. With this level of effectiveness from such a commonly used filtering setup, it wouldn't surprise me if the volume of spam started decreasing because people no longer see it as an effective marketing tool.
Google AdWords is basically just as cheap and reaches a much more targeted (while still enormous) audience. AdWords also has the benefit of not pissing off your customers by flooding their inboxes with crap. Not astroturfing or anything, but if I was going to spend $100 on advertising, I think AdWords would be a better use of my money than spam.