Their internal policies may have always been rather progressive (in part as a reflection the local culture around their corporate campus), but prior to the anti-trust case, they were (for the most part) non-participants in Washington politics.
When they did enter, they found more foothold with Republicans who were observing that the whole NASDAQ tended to move in pretty much the exact same direction as MSFT (an early precursor to the "too big to fail" dogma, perhaps?), than with Democrats who seemed to want to replay the glory days of busting up Standard Oil and Ma Bell.
On the other hand, it's probably not too late for them to buy their way in to the hearts and minds of the current Democrat regime.
If pot, coke, heroin, LSD, and E were all legal and easy to acquire, would anybody ever bother with something as stunningly dangerous as Crystal Meth?
Isn't the main appeal of meth the fact that large batches of it can be quickly cooked up in a trash can in a vacant lake cabin using relatively cheap ingredients and then sold for outrageous amounts of money?
What would be the attraction for a potential market of users if they can get a better, safer high for less money without breaking any laws or dealing with low-life pushers?
[quote]This is also what we're talking about... the change rate, not the market share.[/quote] Rate? If you have say 20 users, it's easy to get to 40 users and report 100% growth. Microsoft can never report any significant growth, because they own 90% of the market. Linux owns just 0.6%. Which is simply pathetic. Get real, moron.
Exactly. (Other than the name-callinig.)
It's the classic false reasoning of expecting trends to continue forever.
"My puppy's weight has doubled every six months for the last year and a half. If current trends continue, my dog will soon out-weigh my car."
If you can leave any time you like, it's not a prison. It's just a really shitty hotel.
Yup...a really shitty hotel in a suburban wasteland, outside an unfamiliar city, booked for you by the corporate travel agency.
A shuttle dropped you off at midnight. No phone, no network, and the front desk closed as soon as you checked in. The nearest open business is a 7-11 almost a mile away. They have a vandalized payphone with no phone book.
Can you make it to the sleek boutique hotel downtown? Do you even know that it exists? Are your standards high enough to even try? For most folks: no, no, and no. Windoze Hotel wins again!:p
Pretty much exactly my point, which is why both shitty hotels and Microsoft stay in business.
Why does Microsoft, and apparently Apple, believe what we've been waiting for is more features?
I don't know a single consumer who is dissatisfied with their box because it lacks this or that feature.
The consumers I know who are unhappy are unhappy with the user experience: box does something unexpected, unexplained, mysterious, unintended, or just plain wrong.
So I don't understand the features war. I would think the vast majority of us aren't looking for the box to do something new and wonderful, but to stop doing things that are weird and obstructive.
Apple has seen, for a long time, that their future lies in devices like the iPod, iPhone, and perhaps even the AppleTV.
Most of their added features (in particular their iLife suite) have been all about making the home computer more of a base-station-like "hub" for all your other gizmos (which you will hopefully buy from them.)
Most of Microsoft's added features were added for the same reason Microsoft always adds features:
1. Mimicking Apple's new ideas, but doing it cheaper to chop them off at the knees 2. Planned obsolescence, to push OEM sales and software upgrades
That could be tough, because they backed the wrong horse.
While the UAW as well as the corporate overlords they "fight" have both been steadfast givers to Democrats, Microsoft has only recently gotten into the politics game, and have mostly backed Republicans (in spite of being based in a blueish-purple state.)
Meanwhile Apple added Al Gore to their board of directors.
The Democrat-dominated Congress & White House response to a Microsoft bailout plea would inevitably be "no soup for you!"
Sure MS may have been worried about OS X in 2005, but the problem runs much deeper now. Let's take a look back:
In 2005, Mac OS X was available and rating "better" as a desktop environment in many places, but in order to "upgrade" to OS X, it required purchase of all new hardware.
by 2008, Mac had adopted Intel x86-based processors and expanded support into the realm formerly controlled only by PC. While technically you still need to upgrade to Mac hardware according to the Mac OS X EULA, the validity of that claim is currently being questioned. Additionally Ubuntu and other Linux distros that make setup easy and are very user-friendly have started spawning and are also beginning to take a significant chunk out of MS's market share. [emphasis added]
There may have been signs of things to come in 2005, but thinks look even more bleak for MS now unless they can get things together with Vista or at least Windows 7.
Balmer must be totally losing bowel control over the whopping 0.63% of users who roll with some flavor of Linux.
(Going by web-use stats, Linux is currently in 4th place behind "other", but don't let the numbers get in the way of a good story. Curl up with your ragged copy of In the Beginning There Was the Command Line and you'll feel better about the inevitable Free Software revolution.)
Then they should do what they did twenty years ago when Chicago/Win95 was nothing more than artists renderings; buy up all the computer magazines or turn the publishers into whores with free stuff, and then you'll get all the Vista-friendly press you want.
Computer magazines!?
You might as well suggest they buy up all the clay tablet producers so they can control the flow of information carved in cuneiform.
As Homer Simpson observed, "they've got the Internet on COMPUTERS now!"
I agree, though Apple naturally dropped the opportunity to really take on Microsoft. If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
This old canard again?
Nobody makes Big Money on desktop operating systems. Microsoft uses theirs to leverage sales of MS-Office and their enterprise solutions.
Apple uses theirs to sell hardware.
The only people who get worked up about the "OS wars" are fanboys. Everybody at Apple and Microsoft is too busy making money to care.
The Dems in Congress voted in favor of the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the FISA wire-tapping bill, etc.
That's why I voted third-party. Neither of the major parties really stand for freedom. One of them just happens to be better at lying to you about it than the other.
Given that Obama is likely to win with less than a 5% edge, just as every election since the Elder Bush vs. Dukakis has come down to a "photo-finish", I think it's ridiculous for anybody to go off about how either party is damaged beyond redemption. They both seem to be able to capture just under half the electorate as a minimum in election after election, and it always comes down to which party machine has the better get-out-the-vote drives.
I can't say I completely agree with your analysis. The Constitution Party is rife with "social conservatism," and has been for a long time.
But I am in favor of re-alignment. I voted LP at the top of the ticket (in spite of my reservation about both men on it), and voted MNIP (Minnesota Independence Party) the rest of the way down.
As far as I can tell, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Gingrich, and Bush 43 all moved to increase the size of government, and make it more intrusive in the lives of ordinary people, and 'freeing the markets' often has meant letting corrupt idiots take the wheel and drive us off the road.
Ike, Nixon, and the two Bushes were never small-government conservatives. Nor is McCain, for that matter. Goldwater-esque libertarianism has never quite managed to dominate the culture of the Republican Party. Show up for a caucus meeting sometime and you'll see what I mean.
For the most part, Reagan and Gingrich both fought hard to reduce the size of government, with the exception of Reagan's ramp-up of military spending. Those who would like to see the GOP return to it's free-market roots are quick to point out that Reagan & Gingrich are not only two of the most successful Republicans in recent history, they are also looked back on much more positively than their "moderate" counterparts.
One thing I don't really understand (I'm European) is how religious fundamentalism is compatible with a "small government" party. A lot of the things linked with religious fundamentalism in the US (such as tighter regulation of media so less offensive content is broadcast and some of the ideas about homosexuality) require a large amount of government intervention into people's lives. The two ideas seem to be fundamentally opposite.
It's a relic of the Cold War. Religious fundamentalists, like lovers of free-market capitalism, were (understandably) scared shitless of the rise and spread of (Soviet-style) international communism.
Now that the "common enemy" is less of a factor, the alliance is beginning to crumble a bit. You will notice that President Bush did almost NOTHING to make the government smaller, and in fact vastly expanded it, content to allow the religious "conservative" movement carry him to re-election in 2004.
For this reason, a lot of conservatives are looking forward to a McCain loss. A smacked-down GOP is going to be forced to confront a lot of these divisions and decide exactly what kind of party it's supposed to be, from now on.
Ai Yazawa is far from a "no-brainer." Her previous work, "Paradise Kiss" got a US DVD release, but that series was a sequel to "Gokinjo Monogatari" a much larger (50-episode) and popular series in Japan which has still not been licensed by anybody.
That's because it became licensed mid-way through. Live-eviL and other responsible fansubbers did, indeed, stop translating it when it was picked up by a US company.
You're comparing Sailor Moon and Buffy with a straight face? Do tell.
A girl who is blossoming into puberty discovers she is a person of destiny with super powers. Sound familiar?
As the series begins, there's a boy who really likes her who she only regards as a friend. Sound familiar?
Another boy, who is older than her and is mysteriously enigmatic at first about which side he is on, ends up being her boyfriend. Sound familiar?
He turns evil for a while. Sound familiar?
Two of her friends (Sailors Uranus & Neptune) are a lesbian couple. Sound familiar?
In season 2 of Sailor Moon, she mysteriously gets a "sister" who is not, in fact, her sister, but everybody magically believes that she is, even to the point of having artificial memories of the new sister growing up. Sound familiar?
I could go on. And on. And on.
At its core, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is essentially a "magical girl" Japanese manga story, right down to feminist girl-power memes and the obvious coming-of-age metaphors. The only real difference is that it's performed by live actors.
And I'm not saying that to criticize it either. One of the reasons Buffy was such a great show was because it was drawing from such a deep well.
Slashdot Mirror
Their internal policies may have always been rather progressive (in part as a reflection the local culture around their corporate campus), but prior to the anti-trust case, they were (for the most part) non-participants in Washington politics.
When they did enter, they found more foothold with Republicans who were observing that the whole NASDAQ tended to move in pretty much the exact same direction as MSFT (an early precursor to the "too big to fail" dogma, perhaps?), than with Democrats who seemed to want to replay the glory days of busting up Standard Oil and Ma Bell.
On the other hand, it's probably not too late for them to buy their way in to the hearts and minds of the current Democrat regime.
The question that comes to my mind:
If pot, coke, heroin, LSD, and E were all legal and easy to acquire, would anybody ever bother with something as stunningly dangerous as Crystal Meth?
Isn't the main appeal of meth the fact that large batches of it can be quickly cooked up in a trash can in a vacant lake cabin using relatively cheap ingredients and then sold for outrageous amounts of money?
What would be the attraction for a potential market of users if they can get a better, safer high for less money without breaking any laws or dealing with low-life pushers?
Ask the unborn child if he/she wants to be born, and THEN decide.
Say something if you don't want to be aborted. Nothing? OK, you're the boss.
Applying the same test to disconnecting life support systems would make America's emergency rooms much less crowded.
Not all flying things are ducks.
... Therefore, any search for ducks must necessarily be futile. (Quack quack.)
Whoever you are, thanks for justifying my reading of AC comments. You win +1 Internet.
[quote]This is also what we're talking about... the change rate, not the market share.[/quote]
Rate? If you have say 20 users, it's easy to get to 40 users and report 100% growth. Microsoft can never report any significant growth, because they own 90% of the market. Linux owns just 0.6%. Which is simply pathetic. Get real, moron.
Exactly. (Other than the name-callinig.)
It's the classic false reasoning of expecting trends to continue forever.
"My puppy's weight has doubled every six months for the last year and a half. If current trends continue, my dog will soon out-weigh my car."
If you can leave any time you like, it's not a prison. It's just a really shitty hotel.
Yup...a really shitty hotel in a suburban wasteland, outside an unfamiliar city, booked for you by the corporate travel agency.
A shuttle dropped you off at midnight. No phone, no network, and the front desk closed as soon as you checked in. The nearest open business is a 7-11 almost a mile away. They have a vandalized payphone with no phone book.
Can you make it to the sleek boutique hotel downtown? Do you even know that it exists? Are your standards high enough to even try? For most folks: no, no, and no. Windoze Hotel wins again! :p
Pretty much exactly my point, which is why both shitty hotels and Microsoft stay in business.
Why does Microsoft, and apparently Apple, believe what we've been waiting for is more features?
I don't know a single consumer who is dissatisfied with their box because it lacks this or that feature.
The consumers I know who are unhappy are unhappy with the user experience: box does something unexpected, unexplained, mysterious, unintended, or just plain wrong.
So I don't understand the features war. I would think the vast majority of us aren't looking for the box to do something new and wonderful, but to stop doing things that are weird and obstructive.
Apple has seen, for a long time, that their future lies in devices like the iPod, iPhone, and perhaps even the AppleTV.
Most of their added features (in particular their iLife suite) have been all about making the home computer more of a base-station-like "hub" for all your other gizmos (which you will hopefully buy from them.)
Most of Microsoft's added features were added for the same reason Microsoft always adds features:
1. Mimicking Apple's new ideas, but doing it cheaper to chop them off at the knees
2. Planned obsolescence, to push OEM sales and software upgrades
That could be tough, because they backed the wrong horse.
While the UAW as well as the corporate overlords they "fight" have both been steadfast givers to Democrats, Microsoft has only recently gotten into the politics game, and have mostly backed Republicans (in spite of being based in a blueish-purple state.)
Meanwhile Apple added Al Gore to their board of directors.
The Democrat-dominated Congress & White House response to a Microsoft bailout plea would inevitably be "no soup for you!"
Sure MS may have been worried about OS X in 2005, but the problem runs much deeper now. Let's take a look back:
In 2005, Mac OS X was available and rating "better" as a desktop environment in many places, but in order to "upgrade" to OS X, it required purchase of all new hardware.
by 2008, Mac had adopted Intel x86-based processors and expanded support into the realm formerly controlled only by PC. While technically you still need to upgrade to Mac hardware according to the Mac OS X EULA, the validity of that claim is currently being questioned. Additionally Ubuntu and other Linux distros that make setup easy and are very user-friendly have started spawning and are also beginning to take a significant chunk out of MS's market share. [emphasis added]
There may have been signs of things to come in 2005, but thinks look even more bleak for MS now unless they can get things together with Vista or at least Windows 7.
Wow. You mean MS might have to continue to limp along with a mere 91.8 percent market share!?
Balmer must be totally losing bowel control over the whopping 0.63% of users who roll with some flavor of Linux.
(Going by web-use stats, Linux is currently in 4th place behind "other", but don't let the numbers get in the way of a good story. Curl up with your ragged copy of In the Beginning There Was the Command Line and you'll feel better about the inevitable Free Software revolution.)
Then they should do what they did twenty years ago when Chicago/Win95 was nothing more than artists renderings; buy up all the computer magazines or turn the publishers into whores with free stuff, and then you'll get all the Vista-friendly press you want.
Computer magazines!?
You might as well suggest they buy up all the clay tablet producers so they can control the flow of information carved in cuneiform.
As Homer Simpson observed, "they've got the Internet on COMPUTERS now!"
People need to be reminded of the monopolistic software prison they live in. They don't have to use Windows, and there is better software out there.
If you can leave any time you like, it's not a prison. It's just a really shitty hotel.
I agree, though Apple naturally dropped the opportunity to really take on Microsoft. If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
This old canard again?
Nobody makes Big Money on desktop operating systems. Microsoft uses theirs to leverage sales of MS-Office and their enterprise solutions.
Apple uses theirs to sell hardware.
The only people who get worked up about the "OS wars" are fanboys. Everybody at Apple and Microsoft is too busy making money to care.
The Dems in Congress voted in favor of the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the FISA wire-tapping bill, etc.
That's why I voted third-party. Neither of the major parties really stand for freedom. One of them just happens to be better at lying to you about it than the other.
Fair enough, but it was yet another election in which the winner failed to win 50% of the popular vote.
Given that Obama is likely to win with less than a 5% edge, just as every election since the Elder Bush vs. Dukakis has come down to a "photo-finish", I think it's ridiculous for anybody to go off about how either party is damaged beyond redemption. They both seem to be able to capture just under half the electorate as a minimum in election after election, and it always comes down to which party machine has the better get-out-the-vote drives.
I can't say I completely agree with your analysis. The Constitution Party is rife with "social conservatism," and has been for a long time.
But I am in favor of re-alignment. I voted LP at the top of the ticket (in spite of my reservation about both men on it), and voted MNIP (Minnesota Independence Party) the rest of the way down.
As another non-US thinker once said:
"Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all those other forms that have been tried."
As far as I can tell, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Gingrich, and Bush 43 all moved to increase the size of government, and make it more intrusive in the lives of ordinary people, and 'freeing the markets' often has meant letting corrupt idiots take the wheel and drive us off the road.
Ike, Nixon, and the two Bushes were never small-government conservatives. Nor is McCain, for that matter. Goldwater-esque libertarianism has never quite managed to dominate the culture of the Republican Party. Show up for a caucus meeting sometime and you'll see what I mean.
For the most part, Reagan and Gingrich both fought hard to reduce the size of government, with the exception of Reagan's ramp-up of military spending. Those who would like to see the GOP return to it's free-market roots are quick to point out that Reagan & Gingrich are not only two of the most successful Republicans in recent history, they are also looked back on much more positively than their "moderate" counterparts.
One thing I don't really understand (I'm European) is how religious fundamentalism is compatible with a "small government" party. A lot of the things linked with religious fundamentalism in the US (such as tighter regulation of media so less offensive content is broadcast and some of the ideas about homosexuality) require a large amount of government intervention into people's lives. The two ideas seem to be fundamentally opposite.
It's a relic of the Cold War. Religious fundamentalists, like lovers of free-market capitalism, were (understandably) scared shitless of the rise and spread of (Soviet-style) international communism.
Now that the "common enemy" is less of a factor, the alliance is beginning to crumble a bit. You will notice that President Bush did almost NOTHING to make the government smaller, and in fact vastly expanded it, content to allow the religious "conservative" movement carry him to re-election in 2004.
For this reason, a lot of conservatives are looking forward to a McCain loss. A smacked-down GOP is going to be forced to confront a lot of these divisions and decide exactly what kind of party it's supposed to be, from now on.
Congress has been a disaster, so you vote to strengthen the majority party in Congress?
I don't think you thought your cunning plan all the way through.
Neither is a good example.
Nabeshin is just a guy, not a company... And in October he was at Oni-con, surrounded by dub actors who are very much down on all anime downloading.
And as somebody already pointed out, the MediaFactory take-downs was about anime that was becoming licensed.
And so was the case with Death Note.
Nobody on this forum has yet met my challenge of a Japanese company insisting on the take-down of fan-subs of unlicensed material.
Lost of Jump titles don't get picked up.
Ai Yazawa is far from a "no-brainer." Her previous work, "Paradise Kiss" got a US DVD release, but that series was a sequel to "Gokinjo Monogatari" a much larger (50-episode) and popular series in Japan which has still not been licensed by anybody.
That's because it became licensed mid-way through. Live-eviL and other responsible fansubbers did, indeed, stop translating it when it was picked up by a US company.
You're comparing Sailor Moon and Buffy with a straight face? Do tell.
A girl who is blossoming into puberty discovers she is a person of destiny with super powers. Sound familiar?
As the series begins, there's a boy who really likes her who she only regards as a friend. Sound familiar?
Another boy, who is older than her and is mysteriously enigmatic at first about which side he is on, ends up being her boyfriend. Sound familiar?
He turns evil for a while. Sound familiar?
Two of her friends (Sailors Uranus & Neptune) are a lesbian couple. Sound familiar?
In season 2 of Sailor Moon, she mysteriously gets a "sister" who is not, in fact, her sister, but everybody magically believes that she is, even to the point of having artificial memories of the new sister growing up. Sound familiar?
I could go on. And on. And on.
At its core, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is essentially a "magical girl" Japanese manga story, right down to feminist girl-power memes and the obvious coming-of-age metaphors. The only real difference is that it's performed by live actors.
And I'm not saying that to criticize it either. One of the reasons Buffy was such a great show was because it was drawing from such a deep well.
s/being/behind/
/. for a while, and fell out of the habit of hitting "Preview."
Sorry. I've been away from