1. Note what Milo said to Audrey after Kida was able to finally communicate with Milo. He said something about the Atlantean language being a mother tongue of sorts, and that some Atlanteans had the ability to parse out what other people speak and eventually speak their language, abeit a bit slowly. The linguist brought in as a consultant on the movie specifically mentioned that in several interviews.
2. Better watch the sequence in the movie again. Note when Rourke held up the page it had a full-page depiction what looked like a star in a very light blue tint. You forget that Rourke has been a treasure hunter for a number of years, and something like that is bound to attract his attention even if he couldn't read the language on the page.
What's interesting was that when Ms. Summers asked whether the role of Princess Kidagakash required singing, the movie producers said no. I think that kind of surprised her since she is a pretty good singer.
I actually agree with most of your sentiments of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
However, I have a gripe about the movie: the expository section of the movie (e.g., the first 15 minutes after the destruction of Atlantis) felt very choppy and rushed. I hope they expand out that part of the movie (maybe add in 10-12 minutes) in the near future to better flesh out the characters of Milo Thatch and Preston Whitmore, the benefactor that financed the expedition.
But once the expedition got going, the movie definitely got WAY better.:) The incredible sequence of the Atlantean Leviathan attacking the submarine Ulysses was just downright breathtaking, to say the least.
By the way, Princess Kidagakash (aka Kida) is one of the more interesting female characters to come out of a Disney animated feature. Kidagakash has the sexy look of Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, the earthy look of Pocahantas, the intelligence and curiousity of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and (initially) some apsects of San from Mononoke Hime.
I should warn people that if they are prone to motion sickness I would be leery about watching this movie--some action sequence have fast-moving up-down motion that can be quite disorienting.
By the way, try to see this movie in the largest screen possible and make sure the theatre has THX-certified sound system installed. I saw the movie in such a theatre and it tremendously improves the enjoyment of the movie.
I am definitely looking forward to the DVD release (likely next February).
All the griping about Atlantis: The Lost Empire being a ripoff of Japanese anime makes me wonder if you can't do anything inspired by an earlier work.
Think about this: remember the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark? If that movie wasn't a rehash of the vast majority of movie serials from the 1930's and 1940's I don't know what is.:-/
Anyway, having seen Atlantis, the movie is more like something inspired by a combination of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Gainax's Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, the Hayao Miyazaki-directed movie Lupin III: The Castle of Caligostro, and the Miyazaki movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
The movie can get clichéd in spots, but gawd, the visuals and musical soundtrack are AWESOME. I highly recommend seeing this movie on the largest movie theatre screen you can find and make sure the theatre has a THX-certified sound system, too.
I think the BEST reason why Monty Python is so fondly remembered is the fact the writing for the show was so amazingly great much of the time.
Remember the legendary Killer Joke sketch? I have really serious doubts that today's sitcom writers could have plotted out that long and wickedly funny sequence.
Real state-of-the-art quality will never come from a compressed file
It's small wonder why the MiniDisc format never really took off in the USA. One of the big problems with the MiniDisc format is that it makes a LOT of assumptions on how to compress an audio file in order to fit 74 minutes of audio onto the very small MiniDisc magneto-optical disc, similar to what the MP3Pro format does in terms of audio compression. The result is considerable compromise in sound quality, especially on any piece of music with big dynamic range. (Besides, the rapid growth of CD-R/RW drives is another very good reason why MiniDisc isn't popular in the USA; why bother with a highly-compressed audio format when you can make discs that have pretty much the same audio quality as real CD's?)
A major worry is the police using these sophisticated sensors to monitor things like sexual activity in private homes. Given that many states still have sodomy laws on the books, can you imagine the police going around town at night looking inside people's houses for unusual sexual activity. Talk about major violations of privacy rights of consenting adults!
I think improvements in low-power display technology such as OLED's and improved battery designs may finally make electronic books a reality soon.
I expect the ultimate ebook reader to be about the size of most trade paperback books, using the latest in flash memory storage. Imagine holding a bunch of long novels you can read anywhere without lugging around a big book or worrying about unduly-small text font size (since ebook readers can adjust font sizes for visually-impaired people).
If you remember from Operation Desert Storm, among the first targets hit were telephone exchanges and radio/TV transmission sites.
In fact, during Operation Allied Force in the former Yugoslavia the local broadcasters spent a lot of time trying to keep up with the regular destruction of TV and radio transmitting towers. And we also had special EC-130 planes that regularly jammed Serbian TV and radio broadcasts, too.
I think the Supreme Court has realized one very frightening aspect of improved sensor technology: it can spy on anyone and anywhere without needing court permission. Especially now with low-cost low-level light and infrared cameras pretty much achieving military quality.
Hopefully, it will prevent things like pointing sensors at private residences on the whim.
Using these advanced sensors to operate on a court-approved surveillance of illegal drug activity is one thing, but using them to do things like trying to enforce our morals laws is quite something else.
What made B-17 losses so high was the fact German flak guns (notably the 88 mm gun) could reach up to 30,000 feet altitude, just above the altitude B-17's made their bomb runs.
As for the Japanese fire-bombing raids, they were devestatingly effective because the Japanese war industry was spread throughout shops in the city and General Curtis LeMay had read the report from 1920's that noted Japanese cities were mostly wooden buildings that were highly vulnerable to incendiary attacks.
I think that given today's computing technology, we can come up with better flying vehicle shapes and better materials to achieve stealth that is far superior to what the F-117A achieved back in the early 1980's.
For example, the Serbs were never able to get anywhere close to the B-2A Spririt, most likely because its stealth characteristics were at least one generation ahead of what Lockheed did with the F-117A.
With improved stealth coatings and modern understanding of radar cross-sections the arrival of the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) will likely mean even bi-static radars may not be that useful either.
I think the CNET comparison test is not exactly a very valid comparison.
There's a good reason for this: Windows 2000 Professional out of the box does not have the wide hardware support Windows ME has. This means there could be potential problems with the newer Athlon motherboards running the VIA KT133 and KT266 and AMD 760 chipsets.
I would repeat this test after the final production build of Windows XP Professional is released (August 25, 2001). I believe XP will likely win out since it's likely by the time of the 08/25/2001 code freeze Windows XP Pro will likely include internal support for motherboard chipsets currently available and possibly the much-touted nVidia nForce motherboard chipset, plus full USB 1.1 and IEEE-1394 external device support.
That's right. Until someone comes out with something BETTER, Microsoft will be the way... but instead of everyone whining about it, they should get off their asses and do something about it!
I think people are really forgetting that Linux's current strengths are not in the desktop computer environment. Linux has been successful in more niche markets: server boxes, high-end workstations and embedded devices such as TiVo. In fact, given the fractious state of UI environments in Linux, no wonder we're starting to see articles expressing serious concerns about the success of Linux on desktop environments. Somebody (IBM or to a lesser extent Dell) should wave a very large sum of money to a group of developers to create a single unified UI for Linux completely with automatic hardware configuration so it can become truly viable competitor to Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.
Frankenstein's monster was eventually killed. Invincible? No. Hard to defeat? Maybe. Microsoft has gotten to it's position by a very intelligent marketing mastermind (Mr. Gates) He just doesn't understand computers but also how people think and what they want. Until someone else can do this, he'll remain at the top of his game.
The thing that has made Microsoft so successful is the very fact their marketing department has been generally way more successful than not in judging user needs for desktop computers. It also helps that in the late 1980's Microsoft started up its superb Usability Lab, which allows Microsoft to carefully monitor user reactions to the designs of various products in development and make improvements based on lab testing. This is why the UI look and feel of its products since the early 1990's has always been top-notch, as noted by the comparison of the look and feel of Internet Explorer 5.5 Service Pack 1 and Netscape 6.01. Remember Word for Windows 2.0 when it was unveiled at COMDEX Fall 1991? One of the first products to take advantage of the Usability Lab, Word for Windows 2.0 was vastly superior to WordPerfect for Windows 5.1, a much-more hyped product shown at the same COMDEX show. Because Word for Windows 2.0 could import WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS files more perfectly than Wordperfect for Windows 5.1, small wonder why Microsoft pulled the rug out from under WordPerfect and became the dominant word processor for Windows to this day.
I think the reason why Lord of the Rings will be considered the best work of fiction of the 20th Century is the very fact Tolkien was very careful and extremely comprehensive in detailing the background of Middle-Earth.
I mean, is there any other novel that has Appendices with a rich and astonishing amount of detail of histories, calendars, aristocratic lineage, race descriptions, and even languages? It is these little details that make Lord of the Rings so amazingly believable.
It also helped that Tolkien spent eleven years writing the manuscript (1938-1949).
I personally think most literary critics that dislike Tolkien do it out of envy more than anything else.:-)
I know you lament the fact that Microsoft is not only hanging around, but is still going quite strong even in the current economic downturn.
I think you need to understand some facts:
1. Companies involved in developing for Linux are NOT getting the type of revenues they had expected. Most companies making commercial Linux distributions are gone, cutting back or gritting it out with lower-than-expected profits. A few companies that are pushing Linux (Dell and IBM) are still around because they are primarily hardware companies.
2. Microsoft is continuing to do well with continuing sales of their operating system and application products, even if their growth rate has been cut due to the economic downturn. MS has introduced a new version of their high-margin product (Office XP) and will ship Windows XP late this October, which will generate lots of revenue well into 2002.
3. Microsoft has US$30 BILLION in cash reserves available for product development and marketing. That's probably more cash than most of their competition combined. This gives Microsoft a massive financial cushion to protect the company as it develops future products.
4. Linux as it currently stands is not a viable alternative in the desktop computer market. Linux will most likely stay a product for servers, high-end workstations and embedded devices.
In short, Microsoft not only has survived the economic downturn, but is poised to be a hugely profitable company once the economy starts up again late this year through 2002.
The thing that hurt Netscape was the fact they released Netscape 6 based on a relatively old version of Mozilla code (Version 0.6). No wonder why everyone hated it; it was sluggish, had a look and feel that was totally different from Netscape 4.7x, and many web pages wouldn't render properly either.
I just hope Netscape might just redeem itself by releasing a new version of its browser based on Mozilla 1.0 code due later this year. It would also help if AOL 7.0 defaults to this new browser, but at the rate things are going that might not happen.:-(
We are doing this right now where I work, (From import CD's mostly dammit!) and in only a couple of months it changed everything. We listen to techno from japan, dance and club from europe, rock from down under, and a lot more. Yes we do buy CD's, just not the top 40 ones. We know where to hear those songs over and over....
I agree 100%!!:-)
I believe the corporate over-control of our FM stations is seriously dumbing down American musical tastes. Americans don't seem to know about popular music from other countries, the type of things that if they influence US musicians could breathe new life into American popular music.
I've heard dance music from Japan and Europe, and they are way cool and very danceable indeed. Too bad buying them as imports cost way too much money.:-(
This is why I have my hopes up for XM satellite radio with its 100 channels of audio programming. I'm sure that among the music channels on XM (which will comprise the majority of programming on that service) there will be channels dedicated to popular dance music from outside the USA. Since XM has complete coverage of the lower 48 states in the USA, it means a lot of popular music you'll never hear on local FM stations will now have an outlet.
While I do agree with your views in many ways, I still think XM satellite radio is still going to be a major improvement over current FM radio.
Remember what I said initially--nearly 100 channels of audio programming to fill--and most of it music. That gives XM way more than enough channel allocation to play a vastly wider variety of music than you hear on local FM stations. Formats you don't hear much nowadays--ethnic, New Age, rap, alternative, jazz and classical--now have an outlet because the channel capacity is there. More importantly, because the entire USA can hear all the XM channels, these niche formats might actually find surprisingly wide acceptance because you can't hear them anywhere else given the way station programmers select music nowadays.
In all this talk about the problems of too-limited playlist of songs on radio stations due to the payola situation, it will be very interesting to see what happens when XM satellite radio starts up later this year.
With 100 channels of audio programming, a limited playlist ain't going to cut it for listeners. You know there will be a huge choice of radio formats under XM, which means potentially a lot of music that we don't normally hear on FM radio stations now have a national outlet through XM. That means a lot of alternate and ethnic music could be heard nationally for the first time.
I'm disappointed someone has modded my original post as funny.
It may not be funny anymore when somebody at the FTC does get a clue about what is wrong with the Sony PR campaign. See, schoomizing real movie reviewers for a good review is one thing, but creating a fictional reviewer and newspaper to do a supposedly positive review is downright deceptive (and violates lots of state and Federal laws).
The FTC recently began cracking down on advertisements that feature "testimonials": although this sort of thing was accepted a few years ago, it has come under closer scrutiny nowadays. Moreover, they attributed their remarks to a real newspaper, and thus made blatantly false claims. They could even be subject to civil suits for their erroneously attributed remarks.
That is specifically the reason why the FTC may may have a nice long talk with Sony Pictures about the advertising for their recent movies. The reason is simple: it may the first time someone has tried to pull this type of deception off and got caught red-handed.
I've heard of sneaky deceptive advertising, but this just about takes the cake, to use to old cliché.
I think it won't be long before the US Federal Trade Commission has a nice long talk with Sony management on what appears to be a violation of our Federal laws in regards to deceptive advertising.
To explain why the record companies are going after Napster to protect themselves, we have to understand some economics.
Under a cartel situation, companies producing similiar goods all agree to a similar price, which means price will be kept at a high level. The problem with cartels is that there is economic incentive for each member of the cartel or an outside force to undercut the cartel, which can cause chaos to the supposed stability of the cartel pricing model due to price undercutting.
Let's apply this to the situation between the RIAA and Napster. The member companies of the RIAA have more or less agreed to a guaranteed minimum price for an album-length Compact Disc (about US$12-US$18 depending on where you buy it). However, because the price floor is set so high, anything that can drastically undercut this will cause chaos. That was exactly what happened when Napster arrived on the scene: it allowed people to get music from the major record companies without shelling out the high price for the album-length audio CD, namely free.
Unfortunately, Napster is being eliminated when the record companies fought back by charging Napster with violating both the 1976 Copyright Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This has made Napster no longer the venue for customers to undercut the record companies. Alas, the genie is out of the bottle: there are now multiple services on the Internet that has taken over from that Napster pioneered.
It will be very interesting to see in the very end how the entire situation is settled in both the economic sense and legal sense.
Anyone who has knowledge of microeconomics knows the very reason why Napster became popular: the cartel pricing of the major record companies.
Think about it: here in the USA, the average price for an album-length CD is US$14-US$18 at the retail level from a brick and mortar store, and US$11-US$15 from an online store such as Amazon and CDNow. Given that high level of pricing, there is lots of economic incentive for people to find a way to undercut this level of pricing.
That incentive led to Napster, which could offer music at a much lower price--namely free.
Now, if the record companies had been pricing their album-length CD's at around US$8-$10 per disc, then the economic incentive to find a way to get the music at a lower price would be much, much lower.
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Comments on your two of your nitpicks:
1. Note what Milo said to Audrey after Kida was able to finally communicate with Milo. He said something about the Atlantean language being a mother tongue of sorts, and that some Atlanteans had the ability to parse out what other people speak and eventually speak their language, abeit a bit slowly. The linguist brought in as a consultant on the movie specifically mentioned that in several interviews.
2. Better watch the sequence in the movie again. Note when Rourke held up the page it had a full-page depiction what looked like a star in a very light blue tint. You forget that Rourke has been a treasure hunter for a number of years, and something like that is bound to attract his attention even if he couldn't read the language on the page.
What's interesting was that when Ms. Summers asked whether the role of Princess Kidagakash required singing, the movie producers said no. I think that kind of surprised her since she is a pretty good singer.
Rob,
:) The incredible sequence of the Atlantean Leviathan attacking the submarine Ulysses was just downright breathtaking, to say the least.
I actually agree with most of your sentiments of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
However, I have a gripe about the movie: the expository section of the movie (e.g., the first 15 minutes after the destruction of Atlantis) felt very choppy and rushed. I hope they expand out that part of the movie (maybe add in 10-12 minutes) in the near future to better flesh out the characters of Milo Thatch and Preston Whitmore, the benefactor that financed the expedition.
But once the expedition got going, the movie definitely got WAY better.
By the way, Princess Kidagakash (aka Kida) is one of the more interesting female characters to come out of a Disney animated feature. Kidagakash has the sexy look of Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, the earthy look of Pocahantas, the intelligence and curiousity of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and (initially) some apsects of San from Mononoke Hime.
I should warn people that if they are prone to motion sickness I would be leery about watching this movie--some action sequence have fast-moving up-down motion that can be quite disorienting.
By the way, try to see this movie in the largest screen possible and make sure the theatre has THX-certified sound system installed. I saw the movie in such a theatre and it tremendously improves the enjoyment of the movie.
I am definitely looking forward to the DVD release (likely next February).
Folks,
:-/
All the griping about Atlantis: The Lost Empire being a ripoff of Japanese anime makes me wonder if you can't do anything inspired by an earlier work.
Think about this: remember the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark? If that movie wasn't a rehash of the vast majority of movie serials from the 1930's and 1940's I don't know what is.
Anyway, having seen Atlantis, the movie is more like something inspired by a combination of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Gainax's Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, the Hayao Miyazaki-directed movie Lupin III: The Castle of Caligostro, and the Miyazaki movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
The movie can get clichéd in spots, but gawd, the visuals and musical soundtrack are AWESOME. I highly recommend seeing this movie on the largest movie theatre screen you can find and make sure the theatre has a THX-certified sound system, too.
I think the BEST reason why Monty Python is so fondly remembered is the fact the writing for the show was so amazingly great much of the time.
Remember the legendary Killer Joke sketch? I have really serious doubts that today's sitcom writers could have plotted out that long and wickedly funny sequence.
Real state-of-the-art quality will never come from a compressed file
It's small wonder why the MiniDisc format never really took off in the USA. One of the big problems with the MiniDisc format is that it makes a LOT of assumptions on how to compress an audio file in order to fit 74 minutes of audio onto the very small MiniDisc magneto-optical disc, similar to what the MP3Pro format does in terms of audio compression. The result is considerable compromise in sound quality, especially on any piece of music with big dynamic range. (Besides, the rapid growth of CD-R/RW drives is another very good reason why MiniDisc isn't popular in the USA; why bother with a highly-compressed audio format when you can make discs that have pretty much the same audio quality as real CD's?)
I'm sorry if what I said may be a bit misleading.
A major worry is the police using these sophisticated sensors to monitor things like sexual activity in private homes. Given that many states still have sodomy laws on the books, can you imagine the police going around town at night looking inside people's houses for unusual sexual activity. Talk about major violations of privacy rights of consenting adults!
That is correct. :-)
I think improvements in low-power display technology such as OLED's and improved battery designs may finally make electronic books a reality soon.
I expect the ultimate ebook reader to be about the size of most trade paperback books, using the latest in flash memory storage. Imagine holding a bunch of long novels you can read anywhere without lugging around a big book or worrying about unduly-small text font size (since ebook readers can adjust font sizes for visually-impaired people).
That is correct.
If you remember from Operation Desert Storm, among the first targets hit were telephone exchanges and radio/TV transmission sites.
In fact, during Operation Allied Force in the former Yugoslavia the local broadcasters spent a lot of time trying to keep up with the regular destruction of TV and radio transmitting towers. And we also had special EC-130 planes that regularly jammed Serbian TV and radio broadcasts, too.
I think the Supreme Court has realized one very frightening aspect of improved sensor technology: it can spy on anyone and anywhere without needing court permission. Especially now with low-cost low-level light and infrared cameras pretty much achieving military quality.
Hopefully, it will prevent things like pointing sensors at private residences on the whim.
Using these advanced sensors to operate on a court-approved surveillance of illegal drug activity is one thing, but using them to do things like trying to enforce our morals laws is quite something else.
What made B-17 losses so high was the fact German flak guns (notably the 88 mm gun) could reach up to 30,000 feet altitude, just above the altitude B-17's made their bomb runs.
As for the Japanese fire-bombing raids, they were devestatingly effective because the Japanese war industry was spread throughout shops in the city and General Curtis LeMay had read the report from 1920's that noted Japanese cities were mostly wooden buildings that were highly vulnerable to incendiary attacks.
I think that given today's computing technology, we can come up with better flying vehicle shapes and better materials to achieve stealth that is far superior to what the F-117A achieved back in the early 1980's.
For example, the Serbs were never able to get anywhere close to the B-2A Spririt, most likely because its stealth characteristics were at least one generation ahead of what Lockheed did with the F-117A.
With improved stealth coatings and modern understanding of radar cross-sections the arrival of the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) will likely mean even bi-static radars may not be that useful either.
I think the CNET comparison test is not exactly a very valid comparison.
There's a good reason for this: Windows 2000 Professional out of the box does not have the wide hardware support Windows ME has. This means there could be potential problems with the newer Athlon motherboards running the VIA KT133 and KT266 and AMD 760 chipsets.
I would repeat this test after the final production build of Windows XP Professional is released (August 25, 2001). I believe XP will likely win out since it's likely by the time of the 08/25/2001 code freeze Windows XP Pro will likely include internal support for motherboard chipsets currently available and possibly the much-touted nVidia nForce motherboard chipset, plus full USB 1.1 and IEEE-1394 external device support.
That's right. Until someone comes out with something BETTER, Microsoft will be the way... but instead of everyone whining about it, they should get off their asses and do something about it!
I think people are really forgetting that Linux's current strengths are not in the desktop computer environment. Linux has been successful in more niche markets: server boxes, high-end workstations and embedded devices such as TiVo. In fact, given the fractious state of UI environments in Linux, no wonder we're starting to see articles expressing serious concerns about the success of Linux on desktop environments. Somebody (IBM or to a lesser extent Dell) should wave a very large sum of money to a group of developers to create a single unified UI for Linux completely with automatic hardware configuration so it can become truly viable competitor to Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.
Frankenstein's monster was eventually killed. Invincible? No. Hard to defeat? Maybe. Microsoft has gotten to it's position by a very intelligent marketing mastermind (Mr. Gates) He just doesn't understand computers but also how people think and what they want. Until someone else can do this, he'll remain at the top of his game.
The thing that has made Microsoft so successful is the very fact their marketing department has been generally way more successful than not in judging user needs for desktop computers. It also helps that in the late 1980's Microsoft started up its superb Usability Lab, which allows Microsoft to carefully monitor user reactions to the designs of various products in development and make improvements based on lab testing. This is why the UI look and feel of its products since the early 1990's has always been top-notch, as noted by the comparison of the look and feel of Internet Explorer 5.5 Service Pack 1 and Netscape 6.01. Remember Word for Windows 2.0 when it was unveiled at COMDEX Fall 1991? One of the first products to take advantage of the Usability Lab, Word for Windows 2.0 was vastly superior to WordPerfect for Windows 5.1, a much-more hyped product shown at the same COMDEX show. Because Word for Windows 2.0 could import WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS files more perfectly than Wordperfect for Windows 5.1, small wonder why Microsoft pulled the rug out from under WordPerfect and became the dominant word processor for Windows to this day.
I think the reason why Lord of the Rings will be considered the best work of fiction of the 20th Century is the very fact Tolkien was very careful and extremely comprehensive in detailing the background of Middle-Earth.
:-)
I mean, is there any other novel that has Appendices with a rich and astonishing amount of detail of histories, calendars, aristocratic lineage, race descriptions, and even languages? It is these little details that make Lord of the Rings so amazingly believable.
It also helped that Tolkien spent eleven years writing the manuscript (1938-1949).
I personally think most literary critics that dislike Tolkien do it out of envy more than anything else.
Jon,
I know you lament the fact that Microsoft is not only hanging around, but is still going quite strong even in the current economic downturn.
I think you need to understand some facts:
1. Companies involved in developing for Linux are NOT getting the type of revenues they had expected. Most companies making commercial Linux distributions are gone, cutting back or gritting it out with lower-than-expected profits. A few companies that are pushing Linux (Dell and IBM) are still around because they are primarily hardware companies.
2. Microsoft is continuing to do well with continuing sales of their operating system and application products, even if their growth rate has been cut due to the economic downturn. MS has introduced a new version of their high-margin product (Office XP) and will ship Windows XP late this October, which will generate lots of revenue well into 2002.
3. Microsoft has US$30 BILLION in cash reserves available for product development and marketing. That's probably more cash than most of their competition combined. This gives Microsoft a massive financial cushion to protect the company as it develops future products.
4. Linux as it currently stands is not a viable alternative in the desktop computer market. Linux will most likely stay a product for servers, high-end workstations and embedded devices.
In short, Microsoft not only has survived the economic downturn, but is poised to be a hugely profitable company once the economy starts up again late this year through 2002.
Sad to say I have to agree with you.
:-(
The thing that hurt Netscape was the fact they released Netscape 6 based on a relatively old version of Mozilla code (Version 0.6). No wonder why everyone hated it; it was sluggish, had a look and feel that was totally different from Netscape 4.7x, and many web pages wouldn't render properly either.
I just hope Netscape might just redeem itself by releasing a new version of its browser based on Mozilla 1.0 code due later this year. It would also help if AOL 7.0 defaults to this new browser, but at the rate things are going that might not happen.
We are doing this right now where I work, (From import CD's mostly dammit!) and in only a couple of months it changed everything. We listen to techno from japan, dance and club from europe, rock from down under, and a lot more. Yes we do buy CD's, just not the top 40 ones. We know where to hear those songs over and over....
:-)
:-(
I agree 100%!!
I believe the corporate over-control of our FM stations is seriously dumbing down American musical tastes. Americans don't seem to know about popular music from other countries, the type of things that if they influence US musicians could breathe new life into American popular music.
I've heard dance music from Japan and Europe, and they are way cool and very danceable indeed. Too bad buying them as imports cost way too much money.
This is why I have my hopes up for XM satellite radio with its 100 channels of audio programming. I'm sure that among the music channels on XM (which will comprise the majority of programming on that service) there will be channels dedicated to popular dance music from outside the USA. Since XM has complete coverage of the lower 48 states in the USA, it means a lot of popular music you'll never hear on local FM stations will now have an outlet.
While I do agree with your views in many ways, I still think XM satellite radio is still going to be a major improvement over current FM radio.
Remember what I said initially--nearly 100 channels of audio programming to fill--and most of it music. That gives XM way more than enough channel allocation to play a vastly wider variety of music than you hear on local FM stations. Formats you don't hear much nowadays--ethnic, New Age, rap, alternative, jazz and classical--now have an outlet because the channel capacity is there. More importantly, because the entire USA can hear all the XM channels, these niche formats might actually find surprisingly wide acceptance because you can't hear them anywhere else given the way station programmers select music nowadays.
In all this talk about the problems of too-limited playlist of songs on radio stations due to the payola situation, it will be very interesting to see what happens when XM satellite radio starts up later this year.
With 100 channels of audio programming, a limited playlist ain't going to cut it for listeners. You know there will be a huge choice of radio formats under XM, which means potentially a lot of music that we don't normally hear on FM radio stations now have a national outlet through XM. That means a lot of alternate and ethnic music could be heard nationally for the first time.
I'm disappointed someone has modded my original post as funny.
It may not be funny anymore when somebody at the FTC does get a clue about what is wrong with the Sony PR campaign. See, schoomizing real movie reviewers for a good review is one thing, but creating a fictional reviewer and newspaper to do a supposedly positive review is downright deceptive (and violates lots of state and Federal laws).
The FTC recently began cracking down on advertisements that feature "testimonials": although this sort of thing was accepted a few years ago, it has come under closer scrutiny nowadays. Moreover, they attributed their remarks to a real newspaper, and thus made blatantly false claims. They could even be subject to civil suits for their erroneously attributed remarks.
That is specifically the reason why the FTC may may have a nice long talk with Sony Pictures about the advertising for their recent movies. The reason is simple: it may the first time someone has tried to pull this type of deception off and got caught red-handed.
I've heard of sneaky deceptive advertising, but this just about takes the cake, to use to old cliché.
I think it won't be long before the US Federal Trade Commission has a nice long talk with Sony management on what appears to be a violation of our Federal laws in regards to deceptive advertising.
To explain why the record companies are going after Napster to protect themselves, we have to understand some economics.
Under a cartel situation, companies producing similiar goods all agree to a similar price, which means price will be kept at a high level. The problem with cartels is that there is economic incentive for each member of the cartel or an outside force to undercut the cartel, which can cause chaos to the supposed stability of the cartel pricing model due to price undercutting.
Let's apply this to the situation between the RIAA and Napster. The member companies of the RIAA have more or less agreed to a guaranteed minimum price for an album-length Compact Disc (about US$12-US$18 depending on where you buy it). However, because the price floor is set so high, anything that can drastically undercut this will cause chaos. That was exactly what happened when Napster arrived on the scene: it allowed people to get music from the major record companies without shelling out the high price for the album-length audio CD, namely free.
Unfortunately, Napster is being eliminated when the record companies fought back by charging Napster with violating both the 1976 Copyright Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This has made Napster no longer the venue for customers to undercut the record companies. Alas, the genie is out of the bottle: there are now multiple services on the Internet that has taken over from that Napster pioneered.
It will be very interesting to see in the very end how the entire situation is settled in both the economic sense and legal sense.
Anyone who has knowledge of microeconomics knows the very reason why Napster became popular: the cartel pricing of the major record companies.
Think about it: here in the USA, the average price for an album-length CD is US$14-US$18 at the retail level from a brick and mortar store, and US$11-US$15 from an online store such as Amazon and CDNow. Given that high level of pricing, there is lots of economic incentive for people to find a way to undercut this level of pricing.
That incentive led to Napster, which could offer music at a much lower price--namely free.
Now, if the record companies had been pricing their album-length CD's at around US$8-$10 per disc, then the economic incentive to find a way to get the music at a lower price would be much, much lower.