I think there is a big difference on key issues that might happen to coincide with corporate interests.
Dems (or their corporate masters) prefer a high wage economy based on higher order production Reps prefer a low wage economy based on lower order production (raw material extraction, low end manufacturing...)
hence Dems want a individualistic responsible society Reps want stronger social controls
also Dems want greater international cooperation Reps want more unilateral authority
I can see how some corporations might align with the Dems. That doesn't mean that doesn't lead to a better life for the general population.
Hi Hairy good response I'm enjoying this conversation. I think we are agreeing on quite a bit. There is one major point of disagreement which drives the rest. Are OEMs concerned about volume or profits? I'll use your $8-35 because I think its right. So lets say average profit is $20 / system. Conversely if they were selling $1k systems at 20% total margin they could sell 90% less and still make the same money. There is absolutely no question in my mind that if you offered the OEMs an opportunity to lose 1/2 of all their customers and in exchange go back to the world of 20-30% margins they would elated, even with 10% margins losing 1/2 their customers would still be a no brainer. And this is where I think you are disagreeing with me.
Part of the reason I think you are disagreeing is perhaps you haven't seen expensive PCs in widespread use. Up until a few years ago PC vendors were doing 10m units plus in the $1k and over market. So obviously there are a lot of people willing to buy expensive PCs. I've mentioned the Fuji before, this is absolutely standard equipment in medical. Urine is acidic so it can wear through seals, has salts and water so highly conductive and gets on everything in a medical setting. At the same time it has to be light, usable as a touch screen, cable of running medical apps... Fujitsu doesn't sell an under $1k computer. And incidentally this year they have weakened their $1200 line to push people up towards the $1700 models. Now Apple's move from 2% to 12% of the market has been aimed squarely at this group of higher end buyers. And it is certainly true there are far less of them then there were in 2007. But part of that has been the fact that Microsoft, Intel, the 3rd party software vendors and the OEMs have targeted marketshare over profits with disastrous consequences for all of them. That market should belong to a modern day Commodore, not to a Dell.
Dell wants to be an IT services company like IBM. The "Dude you are getting a Dell" has been undermining their branding and undermining their ability to compete. It takes 200 $500 PCs at $20 profit to make up for losing one $14,000 server with $4000 profit; and frequently the guys buying the $14000 server wants lots and lots while the $500 PC buyer buys one system every few years. Back in 2001 incidentally I bought a $4000 Dell laptop the absolute top of the line Inspiron 8000. This was before the Inspiron became total crap: 1600x1200,.5g ram, 50g hd, 1ghz pentium3 which was an excellent desktop replacement system for the time, I could run Windows 2000, Oracle client and server (not with huge data sets but I didn't need huge data sets), running scripts against the data in cygwin and still be making notes in Word So when you say no one would buy those systems, I did buy those systems. And I owned a Macbook at the time. Now I'll agree that isn't exactly home use, but I've never owned a "home only system" whatever computer I use for watching movies also has to do professional work.
And before you say I'm totally a typical... the economic differences between Apple users and Windows users are not that large. median household income Mac = $98,560, PC = $74,452. When you are down at $35k you are starting to hit the population that doesn't own any computers, or one very old one for the whole family. I can see as a greybox store owner, your builds might be catering to this population and that might be giving you a biased view of how broke the average PC user really is. The top 2/3rds of PC people aren't people who can't afford a better computer they are people who just so reason to buy luxury goods in general and their Windows 7 machines are "good enough". That's the group Balmer is going after, to keep their computer business and to get their cellphone and tablet business. The cost might be losing the $35k group but at least if you grant they are in serious danger of losing consumer all together its worth it.
So the final thing I'd throw at you is I get the impression you disagr
Yes, it does support "most" advanced Word features, but I would be the first to admit not all. They are not in the same places in the menus, but most of them are indeed there.
Completely configurable line sizes and colours. Page Style sheets that are linked to each other. Advanced integrated bibliography handling Related content management i.e. tying multiple documents together on different axis
etc... Those things aren't at different places they just aren't there.
But that's kind of beside the point. MOST people don't need or use most of Word's "advanced" features.
Not true. As I said above the/. crowd tends to be ignorant of these sorts of advanced features because they aren't heavy office productivity users. Most users do use a few of these advanced features. The problem for porting is they all use different ones. So anytime you do attempt to port people over to OpenOffice they do in-fact experience a loss of features they were using. The cost may justify this loss, but it is really there. Look at the OO forums they are filled with people asking "how do I do X in OO that I used to do in Word". And similarly for Excel and Powerpoint.
That's nice. And it shows that you are at least a couple of years behind the curve. Open Office and Libre Office have had native OS X versions out for quite a while now. NeoOffice hasn't been necessary for a year or two.
I'm aware of their native versions. They are inferior to NeoOffice. For example 18 months ago I was getting frequent crashes with OO's version of Base (medium sized database, 7m records) that I wasn't having with NeoOffice. In OO and LO float windows (ex style bars) float like they should in MS Windows not OSX, a partial port of the interface. And the inclusion of services is important. I can't think of any good reason to use OO/LO over Neo on a Mac.
Of course. But most of the people under discussion here aren't "high end" at all.
Why do you think that back when people got Microsoft Works often for free they still bought Office?
If NBC were going to falsify tape why pick a nobody? They would do it with a far more important target than that. Zimmerman was most likely the result of an overzealous editor that didn't get caught. A mistake.
The article seems to confuse three entirely different approaches alternative to SQL.
1) Modern NoSQL, the product he lists. These are basically an old fashioned Network Databases for UNIX servers. The goal being to get performance much higher than what is possible with Relational at the expense of making the database far less flexible.
2) Associative Databases. The goal being to drive up flexibility substantially often at the expense of performance, by orders of magnitude.
3) Object-Relational. The goal being to drive up the performance of the developers by embedding the intermediate layers directly in the database. This loses both flexibility and often performance in exchange for moderate reductions of development cost and development complexity.
Relational is a compromise between a bunch of conflicting goals. If you can't afford to compromise you can't use relational. But this article which takes all the advantages of a variety of NoSQL approaches and intermixes them as if you can get them all together rather than they are pulling in opposite directions.
I don't know of any study or research tying the problems to the Windows interface rather than:
a) Much worse hardware b) Inclusion of Skype and the carrier boycotts. c) Little available software d) Nokia customers preferring Symbian and to some extent Meego.
Metro being good doesn't fix all those other problems.
SOPA and PIPA are bad issues for the media because the media companies stand to gain from them. I wouldn't judge the media on those ones at all. That's just a systematic problem where interests of big media are going to get favorable treatment.
Andrea Mitchell Report is an MSNBC show. But yes, the Zimmerman tape. Attempting to be objective is not the same as achieving perfection in every regard on every issue. Here is a list from Media Matters for America which includes the NBC tag:
I agree. I think the Windows 8 strategy in driving up hardware prices might finally create a reasonable sized niche at the low end for the Linux desktops. Linux has always made sense for the low end of the market. XP was so compelling though, and Microsoft so intent on capturing the low end even at the expense of their own profits that they've crushed the market. Now they have too many other threats and the low end of the market would hold them back.
Most of the people who have tried Metro on the right sorts of equipment love it. Where it sucks is on traditional mouse/keyboard input systems. Microsoft appears to have the vision for changing the x86 platform and moving it towards that sort of hardware. There is a going to be a huge backlash, they claim to be willing to stand their ground. We'll have to wait and see.
Nonsense. You very rarely hear serious critiques of American positions that are agreed to by Democrats and Republicans on ABC, CBS and NBC. There is a very narrow window of thought on those networks. Moreover they present Republican positions as if there were legitimate.
For example they present the economic debate domestically as just two ideas without presenting the fact that essentially 100% of economists agree with the Democratic / Keynesian position on stimulus. They present the Republican positions on Iran without every quoting high quality foreign sources that cover the regime like Al Ahram, Al Jazeera or Haaretz; or even European sources like the Times of London, Le Monde...
I actually did that after 2001. I read mostly foreign sources from late 2001-7 almost never touching domestic news, except for local & state issues. However, the media IMHO has gotten way better today than it was then. With blogging, news aggregation and opinion oriented journalism there now is a pretty good menu of domestic news sources for just about any need.
There are 3 things needed for a good argument: a) Validity -- the logical structure holds up b) Soundness -- the facts presented are true c) Completeness -- all the relevant facts are being presented and are in proper context.
Tu quoque often demonstrates a deficiency of completeness. Quite often there is an implicit argument contained in a factual point. While tu quoque doesn't disprove the factual point it quite often does demonstrate that the implicit point being made is in error.
They have already pretty much lost their funding. 40 years ago America had a strong public television and public radio infrastructure producing programs at a loss that worked to educate the public and enhance the public interest. Those are the sorts of things we can't afford to do today because we need corporate profits to be at an all time high.
Not from, to. A Wall Street Investment Bank is far more interested in things that CNBC doesn't cover:
a) Whose in and whose out in various regulatory agencies b) What the compensation plans are at various banks c) Whose getting what percentage on which IPOs d) Which companies pay high fees on their issuances e) What pension funds are shopping around for new management. f) How different derivative pricing models are holding up. g) New hedge vehicles.
A network dedicated to Wall Street Investment banks would be covering those sorts of stories.
Probably FOX where your mind is slowly corrupted and in a few years you turn into a raving Tea Party lunatic. But since you know the results of that path, stick with MSNBC.
Well first off they did do that, it was called Microsoft channels and was a key component of I.E. 4. Pointcast and Avantgo ended up offering better alternatives but yes Microsoft did do that.
With the other line, they wanted exclusive content. Microsoft was of the opinion, that the internet allowed for styles of journalism that couldn't exist on print and broadcast. For example offering the depth of good newspaper articles but being updated constantly like cable news. They wanted to be much more than just a news portal with Microsoft media.
FOXnews hosts regularly engage in fundraising for candidates on air. That being said, I think most left leaning MSNBC watchers understand they are getting news from a Democratic perspective. For years FOX existed and nothing similar existed on the left. Now something similar exists.
Microsoft started MSNBC along with Slate and other such programming because they wanted a focus on internet delivery. They wanted to shift the American audience from consuming media on television to consuming media on computers. Which would lead to widespread broadband adoption and at least one and often multiple computers in every home. Seems to me their plan made quite a bit of sense.
MSNBC isn't objective, neither is CNBC, NBC aims to be objective.
CNBC covers financial news from the perspective of a the small stock / mutual fund investor. You'll rarely hear news on CNBC from the perspective of professionals or control investors. MSNBC offers opinion journalism from the perspective of the left. NBC tries as best as possible to offer traditional journalism, i.e. news from the perspective of the Washington rulership.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the purpose of television is to fill the time between commercials. But somewhat mixed motives doesn't invalidate broader analysis. \
I think there is a big difference on key issues that might happen to coincide with corporate interests.
Dems (or their corporate masters) prefer a high wage economy based on higher order production
Reps prefer a low wage economy based on lower order production (raw material extraction, low end manufacturing...)
hence
Dems want a individualistic responsible society
Reps want stronger social controls
also
Dems want greater international cooperation
Reps want more unilateral authority
I can see how some corporations might align with the Dems. That doesn't mean that doesn't lead to a better life for the general population.
Hi Hairy good response I'm enjoying this conversation. I think we are agreeing on quite a bit. There is one major point of disagreement which drives the rest. Are OEMs concerned about volume or profits? I'll use your $8-35 because I think its right. So lets say average profit is $20 / system. Conversely if they were selling $1k systems at 20% total margin they could sell 90% less and still make the same money. There is absolutely no question in my mind that if you offered the OEMs an opportunity to lose 1/2 of all their customers and in exchange go back to the world of 20-30% margins they would elated, even with 10% margins losing 1/2 their customers would still be a no brainer. And this is where I think you are disagreeing with me.
Part of the reason I think you are disagreeing is perhaps you haven't seen expensive PCs in widespread use. Up until a few years ago PC vendors were doing 10m units plus in the $1k and over market. So obviously there are a lot of people willing to buy expensive PCs. I've mentioned the Fuji before, this is absolutely standard equipment in medical. Urine is acidic so it can wear through seals, has salts and water so highly conductive and gets on everything in a medical setting. At the same time it has to be light, usable as a touch screen, cable of running medical apps... Fujitsu doesn't sell an under $1k computer. And incidentally this year they have weakened their $1200 line to push people up towards the $1700 models. Now Apple's move from 2% to 12% of the market has been aimed squarely at this group of higher end buyers. And it is certainly true there are far less of them then there were in 2007. But part of that has been the fact that Microsoft, Intel, the 3rd party software vendors and the OEMs have targeted marketshare over profits with disastrous consequences for all of them. That market should belong to a modern day Commodore, not to a Dell.
Dell wants to be an IT services company like IBM. The "Dude you are getting a Dell" has been undermining their branding and undermining their ability to compete. It takes 200 $500 PCs at $20 profit to make up for losing one $14,000 server with $4000 profit; and frequently the guys buying the $14000 server wants lots and lots while the $500 PC buyer buys one system every few years. Back in 2001 incidentally I bought a $4000 Dell laptop the absolute top of the line Inspiron 8000. This was before the Inspiron became total crap: 1600x1200, .5g ram, 50g hd, 1ghz pentium3 which was an excellent desktop replacement system for the time, I could run Windows 2000, Oracle client and server (not with huge data sets but I didn't need huge data sets), running scripts against the data in cygwin and still be making notes in Word So when you say no one would buy those systems, I did buy those systems. And I owned a Macbook at the time. Now I'll agree that isn't exactly home use, but I've never owned a "home only system" whatever computer I use for watching movies also has to do professional work.
And before you say I'm totally a typical... the economic differences between Apple users and Windows users are not that large. median household income Mac = $98,560, PC = $74,452. When you are down at $35k you are starting to hit the population that doesn't own any computers, or one very old one for the whole family. I can see as a greybox store owner, your builds might be catering to this population and that might be giving you a biased view of how broke the average PC user really is. The top 2/3rds of PC people aren't people who can't afford a better computer they are people who just so reason to buy luxury goods in general and their Windows 7 machines are "good enough". That's the group Balmer is going after, to keep their computer business and to get their cellphone and tablet business. The cost might be losing the $35k group but at least if you grant they are in serious danger of losing consumer all together its worth it.
So the final thing I'd throw at you is I get the impression you disagr
Yes, it does support "most" advanced Word features, but I would be the first to admit not all. They are not in the same places in the menus, but most of them are indeed there.
Completely configurable line sizes and colours.
Page Style sheets that are linked to each other.
Advanced integrated bibliography handling
Related content management i.e. tying multiple documents together on different axis
etc... Those things aren't at different places they just aren't there.
But that's kind of beside the point. MOST people don't need or use most of Word's "advanced" features.
Not true. As I said above the /. crowd tends to be ignorant of these sorts of advanced features because they aren't heavy office productivity users. Most users do use a few of these advanced features. The problem for porting is they all use different ones. So anytime you do attempt to port people over to OpenOffice they do in-fact experience a loss of features they were using. The cost may justify this loss, but it is really there. Look at the OO forums they are filled with people asking "how do I do X in OO that I used to do in Word". And similarly for Excel and Powerpoint.
That's nice. And it shows that you are at least a couple of years behind the curve. Open Office and Libre Office have had native OS X versions out for quite a while now. NeoOffice hasn't been necessary for a year or two.
I'm aware of their native versions. They are inferior to NeoOffice. For example 18 months ago I was getting frequent crashes with OO's version of Base (medium sized database, 7m records) that I wasn't having with NeoOffice. In OO and LO float windows (ex style bars) float like they should in MS Windows not OSX, a partial port of the interface. And the inclusion of services is important. I can't think of any good reason to use OO/LO over Neo on a Mac.
Of course. But most of the people under discussion here aren't "high end" at all.
Why do you think that back when people got Microsoft Works often for free they still bought Office?
If NBC were going to falsify tape why pick a nobody? They would do it with a far more important target than that. Zimmerman was most likely the result of an overzealous editor that didn't get caught. A mistake.
They aren't complete if you want advanced features. Just to give you a list of major stuff that's missing:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/grid/index-099021.html
The article seems to confuse three entirely different approaches alternative to SQL.
1) Modern NoSQL, the product he lists. These are basically an old fashioned Network Databases for UNIX servers. The goal being to get performance much higher than what is possible with Relational at the expense of making the database far less flexible.
2) Associative Databases. The goal being to drive up flexibility substantially often at the expense of performance, by orders of magnitude.
3) Object-Relational. The goal being to drive up the performance of the developers by embedding the intermediate layers directly in the database. This loses both flexibility and often performance in exchange for moderate reductions of development cost and development complexity.
Relational is a compromise between a bunch of conflicting goals. If you can't afford to compromise you can't use relational. But this article which takes all the advantages of a variety of NoSQL approaches and intermixes them as if you can get them all together rather than they are pulling in opposite directions.
I don't know of any study or research tying the problems to the Windows interface rather than:
a) Much worse hardware
b) Inclusion of Skype and the carrier boycotts.
c) Little available software
d) Nokia customers preferring Symbian and to some extent Meego.
Metro being good doesn't fix all those other problems.
SOPA and PIPA are bad issues for the media because the media companies stand to gain from them. I wouldn't judge the media on those ones at all. That's just a systematic problem where interests of big media are going to get favorable treatment.
Andrea Mitchell Report is an MSNBC show. But yes, the Zimmerman tape. Attempting to be objective is not the same as achieving perfection in every regard on every issue. Here is a list from Media Matters for America which includes the NBC tag:
http://mediamatters.org/tags/nbc
You can see the left has complaints as well.
I agree. I think the Windows 8 strategy in driving up hardware prices might finally create a reasonable sized niche at the low end for the Linux desktops. Linux has always made sense for the low end of the market. XP was so compelling though, and Microsoft so intent on capturing the low end even at the expense of their own profits that they've crushed the market. Now they have too many other threats and the low end of the market would hold them back.
Most of the people who have tried Metro on the right sorts of equipment love it. Where it sucks is on traditional mouse/keyboard input systems. Microsoft appears to have the vision for changing the x86 platform and moving it towards that sort of hardware. There is a going to be a huge backlash, they claim to be willing to stand their ground. We'll have to wait and see.
Nonsense. You very rarely hear serious critiques of American positions that are agreed to by Democrats and Republicans on ABC, CBS and NBC. There is a very narrow window of thought on those networks. Moreover they present Republican positions as if there were legitimate.
For example they present the economic debate domestically as just two ideas without presenting the fact that essentially 100% of economists agree with the Democratic / Keynesian position on stimulus. They present the Republican positions on Iran without every quoting high quality foreign sources that cover the regime like Al Ahram, Al Jazeera or Haaretz; or even European sources like the Times of London, Le Monde ...
I actually did that after 2001. I read mostly foreign sources from late 2001-7 almost never touching domestic news, except for local & state issues. However, the media IMHO has gotten way better today than it was then. With blogging, news aggregation and opinion oriented journalism there now is a pretty good menu of domestic news sources for just about any need.
There are 3 things needed for a good argument:
a) Validity -- the logical structure holds up
b) Soundness -- the facts presented are true
c) Completeness -- all the relevant facts are being presented and are in proper context.
Tu quoque often demonstrates a deficiency of completeness. Quite often there is an implicit argument contained in a factual point. While tu quoque doesn't disprove the factual point it quite often does demonstrate that the implicit point being made is in error.
Quite a few but a demographic that /. is unlikely to know well. Undereducated, older and traditional in their outlook.
They have already pretty much lost their funding. 40 years ago America had a strong public television and public radio infrastructure producing programs at a loss that worked to educate the public and enhance the public interest. Those are the sorts of things we can't afford to do today because we need corporate profits to be at an all time high.
Not from, to. A Wall Street Investment Bank is far more interested in things that CNBC doesn't cover:
a) Whose in and whose out in various regulatory agencies
b) What the compensation plans are at various banks
c) Whose getting what percentage on which IPOs
d) Which companies pay high fees on their issuances
e) What pension funds are shopping around for new management.
f) How different derivative pricing models are holding up.
g) New hedge vehicles.
A network dedicated to Wall Street Investment banks would be covering those sorts of stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media
Probably FOX where your mind is slowly corrupted and in a few years you turn into a raving Tea Party lunatic. But since you know the results of that path, stick with MSNBC.
Well first off they did do that, it was called Microsoft channels and was a key component of I.E. 4. Pointcast and Avantgo ended up offering better alternatives but yes Microsoft did do that.
With the other line, they wanted exclusive content. Microsoft was of the opinion, that the internet allowed for styles of journalism that couldn't exist on print and broadcast. For example offering the depth of good newspaper articles but being updated constantly like cable news. They wanted to be much more than just a news portal with Microsoft media.
Interestingly enough that's the common wisdom, and it makes sense. But the actual viewerships are quite a bit different:
FOX -- news for the old
MSNBC -- news for the highly educated (more than college)
CNN -- news for the economically liberal
FOXnews hosts regularly engage in fundraising for candidates on air. That being said, I think most left leaning MSNBC watchers understand they are getting news from a Democratic perspective. For years FOX existed and nothing similar existed on the left. Now something similar exists.
Microsoft started MSNBC along with Slate and other such programming because they wanted a focus on internet delivery. They wanted to shift the American audience from consuming media on television to consuming media on computers. Which would lead to widespread broadband adoption and at least one and often multiple computers in every home. Seems to me their plan made quite a bit of sense.
MSNBC isn't objective, neither is CNBC, NBC aims to be objective.
CNBC covers financial news from the perspective of a the small stock / mutual fund investor. You'll rarely hear news on CNBC from the perspective of professionals or control investors.
MSNBC offers opinion journalism from the perspective of the left.
NBC tries as best as possible to offer traditional journalism, i.e. news from the perspective of the Washington rulership.