MS does not take it toys and go home because MS is part of the free market, and as such needs customers to purchase its products and services. More importantly, it needs an expanding base of customers to drive bussiness growth. The video game market will only do so much, and given the dismal sales outside of the US, MS really needs to be kissing the but of Europe right now.
In fact, this is a turn point. Linux might be harder to install, and in some cases use, but Europe and Asia has a bunch of cheap talent that could get a set of tools into shape very quickly. Asia is already doing this. The only reason mainstream Europe is not is that it is still easier to use MS. There is little loyalty to MS outside the US. Again, look at game sales.
The bottom line is that MS, just like any other corporation, must give the customer valuable products. Part of that value can be created by advertising, but some of the value must be innate. MS is pretty good about creating value, but sometimes markets toward the lowest common denominator instead of finding specific solutions. For instance, why would I want an MP3 player on the factory floor? Why would I want to use IE as an application interface, when I could use something else that would be less distracting to my minimum wage employees? We see this in vista, where many of the underlying useful technologies have been scrapped and replaced with eye candy. Why is that useful to the bussiness with 1000 computers? Did IBM obsess about the color of thier typewriters? No, they created typewriters that would last forever under trying circumstances.
So, MS better start becoming customer focused, or they will end up being an outside player. These fines are not about punishment. They are about trying to redirect a major player so we do not end up with a disruption to the world economy. If MS were more responsible, they would not be neccesary. The fact is that most are happy with MS products, and want to contiinue to use them. This does not mena that most people would not go to alternatives if forced. It is this movement that the fines seek to prevent.
I read Ender's Game when it first came out. What I liked about it was the frankness and viciousness. The kids were in the academy to learn to kill, and all the things they were allowed to do to each other were there to help then learn the skills needed to survive. In this way, it resembled any society in that one can only protect the kids that are to coddled all their lives. The rest of the kids must be allowed to learn how to survive.
From this point of view, the critical scenes are where he learns at a too early age to be brutal. Where he leans to use the games an escape, and as a path to his own social space. I think we can all relate to this. The betrayal then comes in the fact that the relatively safe space of the game turns out to be reality, where the structure created in the academy is the fantasy. Most can also relate to this as we discover that the artificial society of school turns out to be the fantasy, while the games we have played end up being the lessons we need to survive.
But Card got soft, with the sequels and the Seventh Son. The dark reality gave way to the technicolour fantasy. In particular, the sequels tried to recast Andrew as almost a victim, rather than a strong hero. I fear that the movie will continue to move the story away from a brutal coming of age. What the sequels missed is that we are not always in control of our destinies, and the true hero makes the best of bad situation, and continues to so do.
It is interesting to read all the comments. First, google, by any standard, is evil. It makes it money not be creating a product, but by aggregating content in such a way that they can attract eyeballs and sell advertisement. This is not necessarily bad, as advertising is necessary, and google is relatively low key. What is does mean is that the average user is not Google's customer and therefore Google, as a business, is not going to be primarily responsive to the need of the average user.
That said, this deals makes a lot of sense. I don't think it makes Google any more evil. In fact, as this merely continues a relationship with AOL, I don't see much changing at all, except for the stated added services for the user. I also don't see this as a mistake for AOL. Any deal with MS would have tied AOL to the MS Windows platform, and made AOL a pawn in MS plan to dominate the internet with Vista. Since one can no longer depend on MS dominating the desktop market, and since AOL desperately needs to slow the shrinkage of it's user base, AOL should try some radical plans. For instance, with Google, perhaps AOL can help users migrate to a Linux OS in they same way they helped users migrate to the internet.
I think we would have found that a deal with MS would have spelled the end of AOL, as MS would have just co-opted technology, bought the customers, then left with a bigger and stronger MSN. Now, Google and AOL can compete strongly with MSN, and perhaps take advantage of the opening made by the upgrade to Vista. It will be good for Google because it will no be more difficult for MS to simply buy Googles customer base. It will be good for everyone becuase even though more stupid people will be using Linux, such are the sacrifices we must make if we actually want a world not dominated by MS. I am fine as long as long as the stupid people stay away from Apple.
But the illegal wiretap issue is soley about (1) and probably has little to do with (2).
We have a sophisticated and well designed system to deal with all matters of civil liberties in this country, and the more I hear about the system, the more impressed I am. Our level of security speaks to how well this system works. Over the past 10 years what terrorist roblems have we had? A couple of American good old boys blowing up a federal building, along with innocent women and children. Another American good old boy attacking the olympics and killing an innocent women. Note in this case the feds fell over themselves figuring a way to avoid the death penalty. And then a few non-Americans taking out a few building, killing many inncoent men and women.
What we have seen over the past few years is a push to destroy a good system, and replace with another system that is not verifably superior, but does disrespect the liberties of the citizens who pay for the government. Lets look at what happened. We have invaded Iraq and galvananized those who wish to destory us. We have set up wiretaps on Quakers, while the fundementalist churches that have created much of the terror over the past several years are free to break the laws and violate the tax codes. We have chased students because of the books they are reading, but can't control materials they can use to destroy building. We have allowed a backlog of al-quaeda transimission to build up while we are interrogating liberals.
What is in fact happening is that the feds are going after soft, politically expedient targets while doing little to truly increase security. As any one knows, that true threat is a unresponsive government, one that does not respect the needs of its citizens. We have had little problem with giving up some rights for security. However, as we are not idiots, we do not give up rights if there is no significant return. These must be taken from us, as has been done over the past few years not by the terrorists, but by the congress and executive branch of these good united states.
One advantage of the MS development environment is that it allows the developers to concentrate on coding the process, and therefore allows more effecient development. Under this premise, it is the responsibility of MS to provide the scafolding so that the developer does not have to waste resources reinventing the wheel.
On the second issue, XP Home should really set up lower access accounts by defaul, and require a password. It is not like users have a choice of OS, so MS does have the power to enforce this security. It will cost MS more in terms of user support, which is really to say they will have to increase funding to the PC builders and retailers, but that would be a short term expense.
As in many things, I feel that failure modes are much more interesting than instances of success. One can have a process that is very succesful when working, but in the failrure mode is catastrophic, then the perhaps that is not such a good process. The focus on success instead means of failure is a big reason why we have so many bad processses, and is a key method to psuh really harmful things onto unsuspecting population.
The nice thing about britannica is that though it is imperfect, I have seen few cases of pervasive campaigns of misinformation. To avaoid this failure mode, an editor should require a writier to be broad and reference a variety of sources. Also, when we are taught to use the encyclopedia, we are taught not to use a a primary source, but merely as a starting point. For instance, few say that the encyclopedia says this or that.
OTOH, the failure mode of wikipedia is potentially catastophic. The winners are often those who have the power to to push thier persepctive of a particular topic. This is not always the case, but since it is a probably failure mode, and since there does not appear to be an effective defense, it makes the wikipedia a much less reliable source of information, on average, than the britannica.
In the end I think the summary is another example of sloppy science. It is not so bad, as it indicates that the wiki can be more or less trusted on the types of topics nature posted, although the wiki did have more erros, though perhaps not statistically significant. The wikipedia process absolutely has to deal with the failure modes, and should encourage authors to point to peer reviewed sources to justify their claims of science and history, and a variety of sources for current events. After all, if everything comes from the weekly world news, we cannot expect much overall accuracy.
The only downside was all the street vendors, which annoyed our tour guide. She said that they all had day jobs, but would often call in sick to go run side businesses to make extra money.
These are called entrepreneurs. They are not dependent on a government job. They are not happy being dependent on the whim of another person to employ them. These people work to build the economy, and, through such work, their country. These people do not complain that a military base is closing and therefore the governmental gravy train is leaving.
However, the other points are correct. The trade deficiet in the US was around 70 billion in october. This is only a deficiet in products, as the foriegn loans and investments probably far ouweigh this number. Asia loans us money, then we use the money to buy their goods. We could make the goods ourselves, but we could not earn enough, or find anyone to loan us enough money, to keep our current lifestyle.
movie simply because the plot may be too hard for some people to understand.
I have not seen the movie, but in curiousity have read several review. Universally, the plot, the actions, and the characters do not seem as free. But even if the plot and acting and all that is excellent,the live action movie would have a difficult time being Aeon Flux. Aeon was as much about the animnation as the writing and character. Without the complexity introduced by Peter Chung, I fail to see what hope any of this has.
In the end, the plot might be more difficult that the average movie. This would not be an issue if the visuals were as dramatic as the animations were.
I recently saw a movie called A histoy of Violence. This was quite a shocker of a movie. Full frontal nudity, depictions of oral sex, depictions of rape, repeated acts of graphic violence. It was rated R in the US. Middle School age kids, maybe younger, were in the audience. When I was young, the violence itself might have made it Rated X. Remember The Graduate was rerated PG in the 70's. Before that it was approved, which I believed meant essentailly X. I also recall a movie called Little Darling which had no nudity, no violence, just adult situations, namely an adolescent losing her virginity. This movie got an R rating. OTOH, Kill Bill, amazingly, was R.
Why do I bring these things up? Because the point of the documentary seems to be that the ratings are indeterminate. Just because this film had some scenes depicting sex, was it neccesary to make it NC-17. Was it more graphic that History in America? Unless it shows actual penetration, I think not.
I am an avid film goer, and I can tell you the rating do seem to vary based on how makes the film, which is anothe thesis of this documentary. For instance, Y Tu Mama Tambien has some brief full frontal in it, both male and female, and a dipiction of sex, but no blood and guts shooting everywhere. When I saw the movie, I understood the characters had just graduated high school, making them consenting adults. This film was originally rated NC-17, but has recently been rerated. I have seen other examples over the years. Therefore, it is arguable that the rating are used to help major studio production gain an articificial advantage.
As an end note, is there any reason for Pride and Prejudice not to rated G? Does one kiss, and some breasts really make it PG?
The real discussion should be the reletive maturity of the two products. After 20 years of coherent design, under the direction of consistent upper management, MS Windows and Word should be a stable productive product. Even after 10 years it should have been a good product, but many of us remember the clunky hack job it was. Even in 2000, with ME, and in 97 with MS Word, the quality was far below what one could have reasonable expected.
Now, compare this to codebase for OpenOffice, which while almost as old as a product as MS Word, was purchased by sun about six years ago, and only has been open sourced for 5. Factor in the time for new management, new developers, and new priorities, and MS Word has a significant advantage. The advantage for MS Windows over Linux is even greater. This is not even counting the massive resources that MS can throw at a project. Just look at XBox. In fact comparing Linux to MS Windows is like comparing MS Windows to Mac OS. In both cases one has a latecomer to the market compared to a forerunner.
For the record I used MS Word on many platforms up to a few years ago. I moved to openoffice.org because the feature set was complete enough, and was reliable enough. Continuing to use MS Office was not even worth the minimal cost of an educational license. I don't find it any less reliable than Office, and certainly has no problem opening up the Word files I recieve. In education one regualarly recieves word files from many different versions, as many people use older machines.
Although Forbes does take into account self reported figures, see the inflated value of Donald Trump, they will adjust this figure to meet the minimum standards of journalism.
It seems to be the general consensus that Eolas wil not go after other browsers. This is not the issue.
The problem is they can. The problem is that I have not seen anything that proves beyond reasonable doubt that they will not. What would be such proof? Offering any GPL product the royalty free use of the patent. Offering the royalty free use of the patent to any browser that is available for non-windows platforms and updated regularly. The lawyers can hash out the language, but until there is more than an empty promis, suing MS is just a publicity stunt to win the support of the ignorant masses.
If Eolas intends to provide the patent to other browsers, they should do so in formal written manner. Until they do so, I can only assume that they are starting with MS for the big win, and then will pick everyone else off one by one.
It seems that the rebate scheme has become more complex, and simply talking about slippage is no longer as relevent as perhaps it once was. Lets take a look at the possible varaibles, and whay rebates are still a scam, still sinister, and still bad.
First, total sales. Rebates allow retailers to inflate total sales, and furthur undermine the ability of the financial market to just the soundness of firms. For instance, the black friday figures are out, but how reliable are they really given that a significant fraction of the money will just have to be returned? Likewise, is the economy really recovering, or is is just that we are slashing prices, with sales and rebates, and therefore moving goods and services at a loss?
Second, credit cards. Most big box stores, those that seem to live and die on rebates, have a credit card. The consumer wil buy a product on the credit card, and then pay it off over time. However, due the fact that the rebate takes 4 or even 8 weeks, the consumer will end up paying some interest, unless he or she pays off the rebate part out of his or her own pocket, thereby incurring an opportunity cost. What will likely happen, through no fault of the retailer, is the consumer will use the rebate as expendable cash, and not pay off the debt. Since CC are increasingly an important profit center, rebates help build the center. However, it also undermines the economy by unneccesarily encouraging the dangerous buildup of debt.
Third, rebates, especially those multiple rebates, makes it difficult to compare prices. This already happens with things like each store having it's own SKU for essentailly the same item, but with the same item one can have manufacturers rebate, store rebates, etc, it is difficult to decide the best value. The rebate allows retailers to claim a lower price than offer, thus further confusing the situation.
In the end, the rebate is still meant to distort the market. I mean if the compute system was free, then were the sales for the day zero? Is the retailer going to claim that product was given away? Is the manufacturer going to claim that they dumpt product? Or will the financial report present a carefully crafted picture, with sales in one account, and rebates in another, that show a record year.
Most teach that 1+1=2, that phenomem require a cause, and that even if the cause is unknown, the cause is natural origin, not the arbitrary whim of supernatural being. There is a matter of faith in all this. We have faith that the laws of physics have been in effect since the t=0 that some would call the big bang, and will be in effect until such a time the universe might disintegrate. We also have faith that the laws of physics work uniformly throughout the universe. The articles of faiths are called assumptions, and are as often ubiquitous as 1+1=2.
Science may someday become a religion. Science may sometimes hunker down behind it assumptions, basking in the booty that it's greed and prejudice has gained, arguing that others are profiting immorally while it'w own priests are sitting in palaces, wearing funny hats, eating scrumptious meals, handing down edicts, while the rest of world starves and die becuase protective devices and medicines are prohibited due to vague holy sciprt, but that has not happened yet.
What has happened is that science has the metacognition to understand that the dangers lie in the assumptions. Scientists dare each other to prove that the constants are constant. They dare each other to come up with wilder hypothosis, and then destroy each other in the process of proving it.The holy wars are bloodless fueds posited through the journals, not barbaric spats on involving noose, or fire, or rape. The vested interests can be unseated with a simple allegation of impropriety. All work is open to public, not hidden behind doors that never see an opposing opinion.
Now, i am not implying that all is perfect, but sciences subversion of religion is deeper than religion. if one believes in natural cause and effect, then one cannot believe that god destroyed new orleans for being a city of sin. One cannot believe that god sent AIDS to kill the infidels of sub saharan africa. One cannot believe that one or two or a few people have a holy authority to dominate the rest of the world. One cannot believe that killing people who look different of believe different from you will result in your ascent to the promised land.
So, all this is not about evolution. Evolution is applied science, biololgy. Useful, and part of cause and effect, but only important as a stepping stone. This is about various groups of people ability to say I am better because I believe in this piece of writing or this creed. This is about someone saying I have the right to impose my will on other people and damage other people, or discriminate against other people, because I believe that god has given me that right. And if I have to kill people, then god has given me that right as well.
Church, unfortuntaly in many cases, has become the last holdout to a civilized society. Nowhere else can one legally hire on the basis of color or belief, caste out on the basis of belief, and get away with hate speech. The evolution debate is one of the last gasps in a long war perpetuated by those who profit off discrimination and hate. Many more will be hurt because those who are willing to kill for profit are vanquished.
This is really the fallacy that has undermined the productivity of the industrialized world. It is true that if one has money and motivation, over time one can develop expertise. This expertise does not happen over night, nor is it permanant. The asian manufacturers have slowly built expertise over time, starting small with low quality products, slowly increasing quality and effeciency until they reach an acceptable level of quality. Likewise, the American, and even European manfucturers have lost thier expertise by concentrating on lowering prices rather than maintaining quality.
The knowledge needed to make a large project happen is wide ranging, and not always found in a textbook, and not always found with a consultant. Supply chains, economy estimates, component interactions, assembly are truly intersting and difficult problems. The simple act of asking someone else to build something, especially if you do not understand the product, can be a major pain. And the last point about using companies that sacrifice cost for quality. That is experience. Knowing who can be trusted, and who can't.
Companies do have core competencies, and it when they merge and buy and consilidate in a fantasy that core compentencies and cultures do no matter that trouble starts. We make fun of their stupidy when the stock falls as cultures collide, but it is comments like the parent and grandparents that promote those bad decisions in the first place.
I think the problem is that MS has no hardware experience. Sure they contract out simple things like mice but they have traditionally left the the complex hardware systems to others. It is, frankly, not thier core completency. It requires the ability to produce a stable product that will work to specifications without retrofitting.
Hardware is not easy. This is not say software is, but there are different issues. Even companies like Apple that has been doing hardware to over 20 years gets into trouble. At the beginning they had major issue. No one will ever forget that one had to lift then Apple/// up a couple inches and then drop it to reseat the ram. We can look at overheating batteries in laptops from Apple and other equally experienced designers.
Which is to say that MS can only buy so much experience. What is interesting is that people have little doubt that MS will eventually produce a quality product. Contrast this to say views on Linux that claim a perpetually inferior OS, even though in many Linux has made faster gains on MS Windows and Unix than MS made on Apple or Unix.
I hate to sound revisionist, and wasn't all that old when IBM was taken down, but I do clearly remember rooting for Compaq. Even with IBM, we had operating systems. What we did not have was affordable computers. When we got the PC probelm solved, then everything else came together. I do not even remembering worrying about the OS. I would run SOS or CP/M, telnet into VMS or Unix. At the when IBM was king, most computer users were sophisticated, and those that weren't hired people much more so than the average contemporary admin.
IBM was evil, and has cleaned up it's act. I don't think MS was ever not evil, although the man got more so when he forgot to put the copyright notice on the product he developed on the governments dime at school. But the points remains. In the end, the savior was Compaq. Although MS preached the benifits of mutlisource, they always wanted to be only choice of OS. Even now, we see higher prices parialy due to the single source OS. It was Compaq that broke the IBM grip on the PC IP, and hopefully it will be google that breaks MS grip on teh desktop.
Forming a corporation is like modding overrated. Most will do both to limit personal liability. Limiting personal liability is logical and resaonable, as the parent suggest. However, most people do look to consequences to guide thier actions, and with corporation, for the most part, their are few consequences. Both the grandparent and parent agree that corporations limit liability. In which case would you be more likely to lie on a financial statement to your partners? The one where you can walk away scott free, or the one where your house will be taken away?
Furthermore, one can sell 10,0000 shares of stock in anything. A stock is merely a document of ownership. Anyone with a high school education knows this. There are many partnerships where the firm is divided just like this. Also, one can have a limited partnership to minimize liability. The stock that most know about is sold over one of the boards, governed by the SEC, and administered by a board of directors, but there is more on heaven and earth than what the common person knows.
The big problem with corporations, and this goes back to the founding fathers, is that it comes awfully close to creating an entity that looks like a person, i.e. a entity that has rights and responsibilities, without the concience or at least the ability to exact consequences. The board of directors can be sued, the CxO can be sued, but, at the end of the day, when people die from misconduct of the corporation, the only death sentence will be to a fictional entity, and most of the perpetrators will be free to commit other crimes.
What is truly scary is that the parent was as unfair, wongminded, and ploemic as the grandparent. Yet one was modded down, and the other modded up. One could say that free speech on the internet is self censoring to minimize the discussion neccesary for a vibrant democracy. One could say that we are so desperate to continue our comfortable consuming life, even in the face of the reality that it is unsustainable, that we welcome any flute player that promises us even a hint of salvation.
BTW, I don't hate corporations. I don't hate america. I pay my taxes without complaint. I vote. I hope all our soldiers are safe and don't have to kill anyone. But modding one rant up and one rant down just shows how dogmatic the world is getting.
It seems to me that the 'sell at a loss' or 'sell below cost' is thrown around a lot, but is realy used as marketing tool. I think MS likes these stories becaus it make the xBox look like a good value.
For example, I don't doubt that most game consoles have been sold at a loss, but that may only mean that the manufacturers did not price them high enough to recoup fix costs. The consoles were probably had an offer price high enough to cover parts, labour, and probably even packaging and shipping. That would mean that the company had to recoup R&D, administration, and other costs on the actual game sales. Not a bad deal.
What will be interesting to see is if this works out for MS in the long run. MS is the only computer company with almost no significant hardware experience, and everything other than the xBox is a failure. I am not talking about simple things like mice and keyboards, for which you hire a industrial designer, then offload development and production to Korea, the put your brand on it. I am talking about complex devices that need complex embedded systems that don't crash. So MS is like Honda in the 70's. It has to sell cheap becuase it is not experienced.
What we see with the 360 is a continued ability to burn cash to learn the market. It is amatuerish but effective. As the other players have already learned, they can continue to offer prices that cover costs. So, can MS dump enough product overseas to become a world player? The current American auto closing shows that it is possible, but one has to be quality concience and customer centric. You can't just always offer the cheapest product. At some point you must offer something unique. This may be make or break. MS Windows and office is not taking over the world, and the US will only be dominant for so long.
Re:Let me get this straight...
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Barenaked USB Drive
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It costs more than a CD
yes it does, and has twice as many songs, and extra content. I have been arguing for a while that if the labels want to sell recording, they need to follow the lead of movies on DVD and have bonus content. Anyway, there are ways to lower the total cost.
The audio's lower quality
Yes, and I suppose that you are one of those that believe the average $200 home system or car stereo can accurately reproduce the high frequencies and other detail that one loses when one compresses. In any case, the bitrate is probably reletively high, and thier, like most music, is quite simple. Popular recorded music tends to be simple because even though we have the technology to faithfully record it, most people simply do not have the equipment to replay it. Clearly this is not something one would buy for a $1000 system, but would you be playing BNL on the $1000 system?
It doesn't work in my car...
This is the same problem we had with vinyl and CDs. Cars, at least at first with CDs, couldn't play either, so we had to make copies. Foprtunately the labels did not sue the auto manufacturers for promoting piracy. It is much simpler to do this now than 20 years ago, though one has to have a CD burner, which almost everyone has anyway. For instance, download iTunes and import the music. Create a playlist and burn the CD. Leave the copy in the car to protect the original. If the car does not have a CD player, or there is no CD burner available, hook up the cassete recorder input to the speaker output of the computer and record. This is what we used to do. Never noticed any difference. And it safer as well.
And if everyone released music like this, I'd have 128Meg USB drives laying around my house all over the place.
Ah, I have a storage closet full of albums, tapes, and CDs. If only I had a storage closet full of something as useful as USB drives.
The sticky tape, or marker, is a permanant solution. Shift key, turning off autoload, is temporary, and could leave other or updated machines vunerable.
If every machine would come with reasonalbe leveles of security, ie autoplay off, autoload of images in email off, rendering of HTML outside of web pages off, Automatic cookie acceptance off, then there would be less need for markers of sticky tape becuaue the only vunerable people would be those that that choose to be or are tricked into turning these own. Rather, most are ticked into using these features at the risk of security.
Which is why my reply has been consistant. It is simply too dangerous to buy a music CD. There is simply no way of knowing wht is hidden in the CD. This is different from software where copy is controlled through serial numbers or defects on the disk. The alternative, is, of course, to buy through a music service. The code still has security risks, but ther is less of a risk of an amatuer doing funny things to the OS. Of course the labels now want more money from the online music services. This means that where a just released CD might cost $12 online, the tracks, with no physical media, no book, and lower quality, might cost more. The cd can't safely be played on the computer, the legal download is too expensive, so one is left with the illigal arena.
or just buy from idependent artist and small labels who don't hate the customers.
If one chooses a closed system, then that is what you get. I know that some phones and some providers turn off certain features and force you to buy expensive software that controls what you can and cannot do.
Which is the big reason why I like my Razr. Standard USB cable. Standard Bluetooth. I can sync, transfer ring tones, and pictures all over bluetooth using the macs built in client. I have not figured how to do this with Java, but I have not really used that functionality. I did not have to buy the stupid additional software
As with most things, the proper combination of hardware will keep things reasonable flexible. It is merely our acceptance that makes thing difficult. And our desire to buy the cheapest things regardless of the sacrifices.
They will not be selling songs, they will be selling entertainment. People will pay the money because value be added. Lets look at two examples.
First the ringtone market seems to be booming, from over 2 billion now to maybe 5 billion in the next few years. Why do people buy these ringtones? Why not just download the song, crop it, and transfer to phone. Well, many people don't know how to do the later. And even if they did, imagine the value of showing your friends that you have a cool ringtone.You are out drinking your $5 beer or $5 coffe, perhaps $2 for a song is not so much.
Second, people pay a great deal of money to see a concert that is mostly lights and mirrors, when an equally talented musician could be seen for much less, sans the flash. Why do people pay so much for these concerts? For the music? To be seen? For the socilization? To have beer spilt on thier clothes? Clearly the value is there.
At the end of the day, people spend money on stupid stuff. Perhaps the market for this is kids who do not have money for an album, but can afford to buy single songs off thier phone, then figure out some way to pay for it at the end of the month. Perhaps the retailers are hoping that everyone with a cell phone will buy one song per month. Clearly the cash is there, and the impulsiveness is there. Now we have opportunity. People want phones to do cool stuff. At this markup no one has to sell a lot of songs, just a few.
I wish that were true, but the reality is that we live in a world where one gets a bestselling book by calling all liberals traitors, no one flinches when one asserts that while we have a second amendment right to bear arms, we do not have a first amendment right to disagreement with the government we vote and pay for, and every says hip hooray when the freest most compassionate country in the world tortures detainees, even though this was something we used to justify our own traitorous acts when the US was founded. The fact is the leaders set the tone of debate, and when hyperbole and hypocrisy is the standard, one cannot complain when the people follow.
As such, almost any free advertisement is good advertisement. He now will sell more books to the wackos that agree with him, and the wackos that disagree with him have now been made aware of the smear campaign. Everyone wins.
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In fact, this is a turn point. Linux might be harder to install, and in some cases use, but Europe and Asia has a bunch of cheap talent that could get a set of tools into shape very quickly. Asia is already doing this. The only reason mainstream Europe is not is that it is still easier to use MS. There is little loyalty to MS outside the US. Again, look at game sales.
The bottom line is that MS, just like any other corporation, must give the customer valuable products. Part of that value can be created by advertising, but some of the value must be innate. MS is pretty good about creating value, but sometimes markets toward the lowest common denominator instead of finding specific solutions. For instance, why would I want an MP3 player on the factory floor? Why would I want to use IE as an application interface, when I could use something else that would be less distracting to my minimum wage employees? We see this in vista, where many of the underlying useful technologies have been scrapped and replaced with eye candy. Why is that useful to the bussiness with 1000 computers? Did IBM obsess about the color of thier typewriters? No, they created typewriters that would last forever under trying circumstances.
So, MS better start becoming customer focused, or they will end up being an outside player. These fines are not about punishment. They are about trying to redirect a major player so we do not end up with a disruption to the world economy. If MS were more responsible, they would not be neccesary. The fact is that most are happy with MS products, and want to contiinue to use them. This does not mena that most people would not go to alternatives if forced. It is this movement that the fines seek to prevent.
From this point of view, the critical scenes are where he learns at a too early age to be brutal. Where he leans to use the games an escape, and as a path to his own social space. I think we can all relate to this. The betrayal then comes in the fact that the relatively safe space of the game turns out to be reality, where the structure created in the academy is the fantasy. Most can also relate to this as we discover that the artificial society of school turns out to be the fantasy, while the games we have played end up being the lessons we need to survive.
But Card got soft, with the sequels and the Seventh Son. The dark reality gave way to the technicolour fantasy. In particular, the sequels tried to recast Andrew as almost a victim, rather than a strong hero. I fear that the movie will continue to move the story away from a brutal coming of age. What the sequels missed is that we are not always in control of our destinies, and the true hero makes the best of bad situation, and continues to so do.
That said, this deals makes a lot of sense. I don't think it makes Google any more evil. In fact, as this merely continues a relationship with AOL, I don't see much changing at all, except for the stated added services for the user. I also don't see this as a mistake for AOL. Any deal with MS would have tied AOL to the MS Windows platform, and made AOL a pawn in MS plan to dominate the internet with Vista. Since one can no longer depend on MS dominating the desktop market, and since AOL desperately needs to slow the shrinkage of it's user base, AOL should try some radical plans. For instance, with Google, perhaps AOL can help users migrate to a Linux OS in they same way they helped users migrate to the internet.
I think we would have found that a deal with MS would have spelled the end of AOL, as MS would have just co-opted technology, bought the customers, then left with a bigger and stronger MSN. Now, Google and AOL can compete strongly with MSN, and perhaps take advantage of the opening made by the upgrade to Vista. It will be good for Google because it will no be more difficult for MS to simply buy Googles customer base. It will be good for everyone becuase even though more stupid people will be using Linux, such are the sacrifices we must make if we actually want a world not dominated by MS. I am fine as long as long as the stupid people stay away from Apple.
We have a sophisticated and well designed system to deal with all matters of civil liberties in this country, and the more I hear about the system, the more impressed I am. Our level of security speaks to how well this system works. Over the past 10 years what terrorist roblems have we had? A couple of American good old boys blowing up a federal building, along with innocent women and children. Another American good old boy attacking the olympics and killing an innocent women. Note in this case the feds fell over themselves figuring a way to avoid the death penalty. And then a few non-Americans taking out a few building, killing many inncoent men and women.
What we have seen over the past few years is a push to destroy a good system, and replace with another system that is not verifably superior, but does disrespect the liberties of the citizens who pay for the government. Lets look at what happened. We have invaded Iraq and galvananized those who wish to destory us. We have set up wiretaps on Quakers, while the fundementalist churches that have created much of the terror over the past several years are free to break the laws and violate the tax codes. We have chased students because of the books they are reading, but can't control materials they can use to destroy building. We have allowed a backlog of al-quaeda transimission to build up while we are interrogating liberals.
What is in fact happening is that the feds are going after soft, politically expedient targets while doing little to truly increase security. As any one knows, that true threat is a unresponsive government, one that does not respect the needs of its citizens. We have had little problem with giving up some rights for security. However, as we are not idiots, we do not give up rights if there is no significant return. These must be taken from us, as has been done over the past few years not by the terrorists, but by the congress and executive branch of these good united states.
On the second issue, XP Home should really set up lower access accounts by defaul, and require a password. It is not like users have a choice of OS, so MS does have the power to enforce this security. It will cost MS more in terms of user support, which is really to say they will have to increase funding to the PC builders and retailers, but that would be a short term expense.
The nice thing about britannica is that though it is imperfect, I have seen few cases of pervasive campaigns of misinformation. To avaoid this failure mode, an editor should require a writier to be broad and reference a variety of sources. Also, when we are taught to use the encyclopedia, we are taught not to use a a primary source, but merely as a starting point. For instance, few say that the encyclopedia says this or that.
OTOH, the failure mode of wikipedia is potentially catastophic. The winners are often those who have the power to to push thier persepctive of a particular topic. This is not always the case, but since it is a probably failure mode, and since there does not appear to be an effective defense, it makes the wikipedia a much less reliable source of information, on average, than the britannica.
In the end I think the summary is another example of sloppy science. It is not so bad, as it indicates that the wiki can be more or less trusted on the types of topics nature posted, although the wiki did have more erros, though perhaps not statistically significant. The wikipedia process absolutely has to deal with the failure modes, and should encourage authors to point to peer reviewed sources to justify their claims of science and history, and a variety of sources for current events. After all, if everything comes from the weekly world news, we cannot expect much overall accuracy.
These are called entrepreneurs. They are not dependent on a government job. They are not happy being dependent on the whim of another person to employ them. These people work to build the economy, and, through such work, their country. These people do not complain that a military base is closing and therefore the governmental gravy train is leaving.
However, the other points are correct. The trade deficiet in the US was around 70 billion in october. This is only a deficiet in products, as the foriegn loans and investments probably far ouweigh this number. Asia loans us money, then we use the money to buy their goods. We could make the goods ourselves, but we could not earn enough, or find anyone to loan us enough money, to keep our current lifestyle.
I have not seen the movie, but in curiousity have read several review. Universally, the plot, the actions, and the characters do not seem as free. But even if the plot and acting and all that is excellent,the live action movie would have a difficult time being Aeon Flux. Aeon was as much about the animnation as the writing and character. Without the complexity introduced by Peter Chung, I fail to see what hope any of this has.
In the end, the plot might be more difficult that the average movie. This would not be an issue if the visuals were as dramatic as the animations were.
Why do I bring these things up? Because the point of the documentary seems to be that the ratings are indeterminate. Just because this film had some scenes depicting sex, was it neccesary to make it NC-17. Was it more graphic that History in America? Unless it shows actual penetration, I think not.
I am an avid film goer, and I can tell you the rating do seem to vary based on how makes the film, which is anothe thesis of this documentary. For instance, Y Tu Mama Tambien has some brief full frontal in it, both male and female, and a dipiction of sex, but no blood and guts shooting everywhere. When I saw the movie, I understood the characters had just graduated high school, making them consenting adults. This film was originally rated NC-17, but has recently been rerated. I have seen other examples over the years. Therefore, it is arguable that the rating are used to help major studio production gain an articificial advantage.
As an end note, is there any reason for Pride and Prejudice not to rated G? Does one kiss, and some breasts really make it PG?
Now, compare this to codebase for OpenOffice, which while almost as old as a product as MS Word, was purchased by sun about six years ago, and only has been open sourced for 5. Factor in the time for new management, new developers, and new priorities, and MS Word has a significant advantage. The advantage for MS Windows over Linux is even greater. This is not even counting the massive resources that MS can throw at a project. Just look at XBox. In fact comparing Linux to MS Windows is like comparing MS Windows to Mac OS. In both cases one has a latecomer to the market compared to a forerunner.
For the record I used MS Word on many platforms up to a few years ago. I moved to openoffice.org because the feature set was complete enough, and was reliable enough. Continuing to use MS Office was not even worth the minimal cost of an educational license. I don't find it any less reliable than Office, and certainly has no problem opening up the Word files I recieve. In education one regualarly recieves word files from many different versions, as many people use older machines.
Although Forbes does take into account self reported figures, see the inflated value of Donald Trump, they will adjust this figure to meet the minimum standards of journalism.
The problem is they can. The problem is that I have not seen anything that proves beyond reasonable doubt that they will not. What would be such proof? Offering any GPL product the royalty free use of the patent. Offering the royalty free use of the patent to any browser that is available for non-windows platforms and updated regularly. The lawyers can hash out the language, but until there is more than an empty promis, suing MS is just a publicity stunt to win the support of the ignorant masses.
If Eolas intends to provide the patent to other browsers, they should do so in formal written manner. Until they do so, I can only assume that they are starting with MS for the big win, and then will pick everyone else off one by one.
First, total sales. Rebates allow retailers to inflate total sales, and furthur undermine the ability of the financial market to just the soundness of firms. For instance, the black friday figures are out, but how reliable are they really given that a significant fraction of the money will just have to be returned? Likewise, is the economy really recovering, or is is just that we are slashing prices, with sales and rebates, and therefore moving goods and services at a loss?
Second, credit cards. Most big box stores, those that seem to live and die on rebates, have a credit card. The consumer wil buy a product on the credit card, and then pay it off over time. However, due the fact that the rebate takes 4 or even 8 weeks, the consumer will end up paying some interest, unless he or she pays off the rebate part out of his or her own pocket, thereby incurring an opportunity cost. What will likely happen, through no fault of the retailer, is the consumer will use the rebate as expendable cash, and not pay off the debt. Since CC are increasingly an important profit center, rebates help build the center. However, it also undermines the economy by unneccesarily encouraging the dangerous buildup of debt.
Third, rebates, especially those multiple rebates, makes it difficult to compare prices. This already happens with things like each store having it's own SKU for essentailly the same item, but with the same item one can have manufacturers rebate, store rebates, etc, it is difficult to decide the best value. The rebate allows retailers to claim a lower price than offer, thus further confusing the situation.
In the end, the rebate is still meant to distort the market. I mean if the compute system was free, then were the sales for the day zero? Is the retailer going to claim that product was given away? Is the manufacturer going to claim that they dumpt product? Or will the financial report present a carefully crafted picture, with sales in one account, and rebates in another, that show a record year.
Science may someday become a religion. Science may sometimes hunker down behind it assumptions, basking in the booty that it's greed and prejudice has gained, arguing that others are profiting immorally while it'w own priests are sitting in palaces, wearing funny hats, eating scrumptious meals, handing down edicts, while the rest of world starves and die becuase protective devices and medicines are prohibited due to vague holy sciprt, but that has not happened yet.
What has happened is that science has the metacognition to understand that the dangers lie in the assumptions. Scientists dare each other to prove that the constants are constant. They dare each other to come up with wilder hypothosis, and then destroy each other in the process of proving it.The holy wars are bloodless fueds posited through the journals, not barbaric spats on involving noose, or fire, or rape. The vested interests can be unseated with a simple allegation of impropriety. All work is open to public, not hidden behind doors that never see an opposing opinion.
Now, i am not implying that all is perfect, but sciences subversion of religion is deeper than religion. if one believes in natural cause and effect, then one cannot believe that god destroyed new orleans for being a city of sin. One cannot believe that god sent AIDS to kill the infidels of sub saharan africa. One cannot believe that one or two or a few people have a holy authority to dominate the rest of the world. One cannot believe that killing people who look different of believe different from you will result in your ascent to the promised land.
So, all this is not about evolution. Evolution is applied science, biololgy. Useful, and part of cause and effect, but only important as a stepping stone. This is about various groups of people ability to say I am better because I believe in this piece of writing or this creed. This is about someone saying I have the right to impose my will on other people and damage other people, or discriminate against other people, because I believe that god has given me that right. And if I have to kill people, then god has given me that right as well.
Church, unfortuntaly in many cases, has become the last holdout to a civilized society. Nowhere else can one legally hire on the basis of color or belief, caste out on the basis of belief, and get away with hate speech. The evolution debate is one of the last gasps in a long war perpetuated by those who profit off discrimination and hate. Many more will be hurt because those who are willing to kill for profit are vanquished.
The knowledge needed to make a large project happen is wide ranging, and not always found in a textbook, and not always found with a consultant. Supply chains, economy estimates, component interactions, assembly are truly intersting and difficult problems. The simple act of asking someone else to build something, especially if you do not understand the product, can be a major pain. And the last point about using companies that sacrifice cost for quality. That is experience. Knowing who can be trusted, and who can't.
Companies do have core competencies, and it when they merge and buy and consilidate in a fantasy that core compentencies and cultures do no matter that trouble starts. We make fun of their stupidy when the stock falls as cultures collide, but it is comments like the parent and grandparents that promote those bad decisions in the first place.
Hardware is not easy. This is not say software is, but there are different issues. Even companies like Apple that has been doing hardware to over 20 years gets into trouble. At the beginning they had major issue. No one will ever forget that one had to lift then Apple /// up a couple inches and then drop it to reseat the ram. We can look at overheating batteries in laptops from Apple and other equally experienced designers.
Which is to say that MS can only buy so much experience. What is interesting is that people have little doubt that MS will eventually produce a quality product. Contrast this to say views on Linux that claim a perpetually inferior OS, even though in many Linux has made faster gains on MS Windows and Unix than MS made on Apple or Unix.
IBM was evil, and has cleaned up it's act. I don't think MS was ever not evil, although the man got more so when he forgot to put the copyright notice on the product he developed on the governments dime at school. But the points remains. In the end, the savior was Compaq. Although MS preached the benifits of mutlisource, they always wanted to be only choice of OS. Even now, we see higher prices parialy due to the single source OS. It was Compaq that broke the IBM grip on the PC IP, and hopefully it will be google that breaks MS grip on teh desktop.
Furthermore, one can sell 10,0000 shares of stock in anything. A stock is merely a document of ownership. Anyone with a high school education knows this. There are many partnerships where the firm is divided just like this. Also, one can have a limited partnership to minimize liability. The stock that most know about is sold over one of the boards, governed by the SEC, and administered by a board of directors, but there is more on heaven and earth than what the common person knows.
The big problem with corporations, and this goes back to the founding fathers, is that it comes awfully close to creating an entity that looks like a person, i.e. a entity that has rights and responsibilities, without the concience or at least the ability to exact consequences. The board of directors can be sued, the CxO can be sued, but, at the end of the day, when people die from misconduct of the corporation, the only death sentence will be to a fictional entity, and most of the perpetrators will be free to commit other crimes.
What is truly scary is that the parent was as unfair, wongminded, and ploemic as the grandparent. Yet one was modded down, and the other modded up. One could say that free speech on the internet is self censoring to minimize the discussion neccesary for a vibrant democracy. One could say that we are so desperate to continue our comfortable consuming life, even in the face of the reality that it is unsustainable, that we welcome any flute player that promises us even a hint of salvation.
BTW, I don't hate corporations. I don't hate america. I pay my taxes without complaint. I vote. I hope all our soldiers are safe and don't have to kill anyone. But modding one rant up and one rant down just shows how dogmatic the world is getting.
For example, I don't doubt that most game consoles have been sold at a loss, but that may only mean that the manufacturers did not price them high enough to recoup fix costs. The consoles were probably had an offer price high enough to cover parts, labour, and probably even packaging and shipping. That would mean that the company had to recoup R&D, administration, and other costs on the actual game sales. Not a bad deal.
What will be interesting to see is if this works out for MS in the long run. MS is the only computer company with almost no significant hardware experience, and everything other than the xBox is a failure. I am not talking about simple things like mice and keyboards, for which you hire a industrial designer, then offload development and production to Korea, the put your brand on it. I am talking about complex devices that need complex embedded systems that don't crash. So MS is like Honda in the 70's. It has to sell cheap becuase it is not experienced.
What we see with the 360 is a continued ability to burn cash to learn the market. It is amatuerish but effective. As the other players have already learned, they can continue to offer prices that cover costs. So, can MS dump enough product overseas to become a world player? The current American auto closing shows that it is possible, but one has to be quality concience and customer centric. You can't just always offer the cheapest product. At some point you must offer something unique. This may be make or break. MS Windows and office is not taking over the world, and the US will only be dominant for so long.
yes it does, and has twice as many songs, and extra content. I have been arguing for a while that if the labels want to sell recording, they need to follow the lead of movies on DVD and have bonus content. Anyway, there are ways to lower the total cost.
The audio's lower quality
Yes, and I suppose that you are one of those that believe the average $200 home system or car stereo can accurately reproduce the high frequencies and other detail that one loses when one compresses. In any case, the bitrate is probably reletively high, and thier, like most music, is quite simple. Popular recorded music tends to be simple because even though we have the technology to faithfully record it, most people simply do not have the equipment to replay it. Clearly this is not something one would buy for a $1000 system, but would you be playing BNL on the $1000 system?
It doesn't work in my car ...
This is the same problem we had with vinyl and CDs. Cars, at least at first with CDs, couldn't play either, so we had to make copies. Foprtunately the labels did not sue the auto manufacturers for promoting piracy. It is much simpler to do this now than 20 years ago, though one has to have a CD burner, which almost everyone has anyway. For instance, download iTunes and import the music. Create a playlist and burn the CD. Leave the copy in the car to protect the original. If the car does not have a CD player, or there is no CD burner available, hook up the cassete recorder input to the speaker output of the computer and record. This is what we used to do. Never noticed any difference. And it safer as well.
And if everyone released music like this, I'd have 128Meg USB drives laying around my house all over the place.
Ah, I have a storage closet full of albums, tapes, and CDs. If only I had a storage closet full of something as useful as USB drives.
If every machine would come with reasonalbe leveles of security, ie autoplay off, autoload of images in email off, rendering of HTML outside of web pages off, Automatic cookie acceptance off, then there would be less need for markers of sticky tape becuaue the only vunerable people would be those that that choose to be or are tricked into turning these own. Rather, most are ticked into using these features at the risk of security.
or just buy from idependent artist and small labels who don't hate the customers.
Which is the big reason why I like my Razr. Standard USB cable. Standard Bluetooth. I can sync, transfer ring tones, and pictures all over bluetooth using the macs built in client. I have not figured how to do this with Java, but I have not really used that functionality. I did not have to buy the stupid additional software
As with most things, the proper combination of hardware will keep things reasonable flexible. It is merely our acceptance that makes thing difficult. And our desire to buy the cheapest things regardless of the sacrifices.
First the ringtone market seems to be booming, from over 2 billion now to maybe 5 billion in the next few years. Why do people buy these ringtones? Why not just download the song, crop it, and transfer to phone. Well, many people don't know how to do the later. And even if they did, imagine the value of showing your friends that you have a cool ringtone.You are out drinking your $5 beer or $5 coffe, perhaps $2 for a song is not so much.
Second, people pay a great deal of money to see a concert that is mostly lights and mirrors, when an equally talented musician could be seen for much less, sans the flash. Why do people pay so much for these concerts? For the music? To be seen? For the socilization? To have beer spilt on thier clothes? Clearly the value is there.
At the end of the day, people spend money on stupid stuff. Perhaps the market for this is kids who do not have money for an album, but can afford to buy single songs off thier phone, then figure out some way to pay for it at the end of the month. Perhaps the retailers are hoping that everyone with a cell phone will buy one song per month. Clearly the cash is there, and the impulsiveness is there. Now we have opportunity. People want phones to do cool stuff. At this markup no one has to sell a lot of songs, just a few.
As such, almost any free advertisement is good advertisement. He now will sell more books to the wackos that agree with him, and the wackos that disagree with him have now been made aware of the smear campaign. Everyone wins.