Uh, what about Microsoft prevents them from literally being unable to give their product away for free?
I grant that I always saw this as a bit strange. I think the point isn't browsers, browsers are just the lead in point on the platform. What's to stop MS from bundling in a store, and anti virus, an office suite a..... ? If you let them control the entire experience you risk severely limiting consumer choice.
Browsers are important because we could end up back at the days of IE not doing anything standards compliant - could they basically railroad people into building a web that is only compatible with IE 16 (sort of like all the custom code paths for IE six).
Sure, the contract only exists because of the anti competitive monopolistic practices, but yes, ultimately Microsoft agreed to do something and isn't. But the underlying idea that this is like the made up statistics about piracy is a bit misleading. These rules all exists, and these contracts all exist because of microsofts bad behaviour.
This is an anti trust issue rather than a theft one.
Are you abusing your monopoly power so competitors literally cannot give their product away for free - that's a competition issue. This is by the way, a business strategy, if you have enough money you can cut your prices enough, or sell a new product cheap enough, and make enough deals that no one can afford to buy your competitors product, but they can buy yours (even if that is incurring a loss for you). The issue with Microsoft is whether their 90% windows marketshare, which is essentially a monopoly is being abused to prevent other companies, such as mozilla, from staying in the market. If that is the case, we don't really want to end up in a world where there is one viable internet browser choice, and that's internet explorer.
Are you copying something for free that you legally should need to pay for - theft/piracy/counterfeiting/licensing whatever you want to call it issue.
But that's not a fair comparison. First of all it's a distribution thing with teachers, teachers who are new are not well off, those who've been around a while are doing ok.
But teachers have to have 3 or 4 year degrees from university + education training (so 4-5 years of post secondary education with decent marks), amongst their peer group, which would be engineers, writers, managers, editors etc. they're sort of middle of the road. Compared to generic english degree they're doing very well, compared to generic CS or Engineering degree they're doing poorly. That's problematic because if you want people to be educated in useful (high paying) things you need to find people educated in useful things willing to take a big pay cut for the privilege of teaching, and it's not really that appealing.
If you ever take engineering or CS in university you'll see that easily half the professorship are immigrants, and many of them have terrible english. Most of the domestic students don't even want to go into grad school let alone onto a professorship, it just doesn't pay well enough to warrant that choice. For a foreigner though it's a great way to get immigration and a steady job you can raise a family on. Our undergrad programme is 80% or so domestic (in many cases second generation, so it's full of indians and arabs and chinese guys who were born here), but our grad programme is about 85% foreign. Teaching, even university level teaching, has its advantages. But it's not nearly as lucrative as going off into industry if you have the skills, and if you don't have the skills (including the basic language or social skills) it's a very appealing career choice.
agreed, as much as I'm underwhelmed by the hardware, I see the thinking, software guys like me aren't taking advantage of quad core processors with 4GB of ram... so don't try and ship that. Ship something that is as good as the market needs at a low price.
Devaluing the Euro a little may actually HELP German exports by making their end products cheaper to foreign markets.
It would certainly, but german exports also bring the euro up as people buy euros to buy german stuff. I agree, I wasn't clear in what I was saying.
Also, with devaluation, everyone is trying to devalue against everyone else, which isn't possible, the Euro, Dollar, Pound, Yen and Yuan all want to devalue against each other, all at once, which sounds like the nonsense it is, countries with strong exports will have trouble losing value if they don't have a huge set of imports to offset against it.
Japan is picking up imports on energy, china on resources, the US on chinese made goods (and they're struggling to find exports), Europe is importing energy but not as much as it's 'exporting' tourism and cars I don't think, but I'd need to look up the data.
You seem to think the economic machinations of an entire continent can be summarised in 3 paragraphs
No, I think/. posts have to be contained to a sensible length.
including the formation of the single currency and its eventual demise
There's no particular reason the Euro has to break up, but it's not sustainable to have a single currency without significant combined fiscal policy. Even gold had the same issue because countries debased metal currencies.
I don't dispute that there is some complicated math I'm not even sure how to do to figure out just how big the combined fiscal policy needs to be to avoid crises like this. The US federal government flutters around 20% of GDP and it seems to manage to be big enough to buffer out a lot of the local serious crisis that plague europe. The EU budget of 1% of GDP seems to be too small to have much of an effect, and country budgets (e.g. in europe), like germany, France and Sweden are all much larger than 20% of GDP and they seem to be good enough as well. So experimentally the number seems to be more than 1, but 20% seems like enough - but you'd have to actually measure just how efficient the distributive effects are past that (the UK for example which doesn't have state/provincial governments at all, or at least didn't until devolution, would seem to be the extreme other end, where you can see all of the distributive effect). But I'm not sure.
And an actual legitimate change in the moral feeling of the world.
Had the UK canada and australia (and a few of the smaller countries) remained one big country we'd be much better off, but overall the morality of keeping africa and india simply made the whole thing impossible.
The flight of capital is what you want. You devalue greek currency and have german money flow in, which brings the greek currency up again... this is how free floating currencies work.
However if you want to look over the longer term, fair enough. Hows the empire doing? Good?
Very. If you sum up the individual value of their imperial territories from say 1800-1900, they are combined doing very well. Canada, Australia etc. are doing quite well, india is having ~7% growth rates. And the UK, despite only having 60 million people is still the 6th or 7th largest in the world and would be a notch higher if it wasn't for osbornes double austerity.
This is why Bank of England has been buying treasuries via 'quantitative easing'
This is making UK debt cheaper to have, and making the UK more competitive with europe and the rest of the world, so again, that's the right answer.
Were it not for the second round of austerity the UK would be doing as well as the US.
Who took those massive debts and spent everything on hookers and blow?
This would be your own 'fact's' Greece http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-debt-to-gdp Germany http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/government-debt-to-gdp UK http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt-to-gdp Italy http://www.tradingeconomics.com/italy/government-debt-to-gdp
Notice how Greece and Italy have had pretty much the same debt to GDP since 1993, at just over 100% of gdp? And notice how neither of them started to explode until 2008 when the financial crisis hit everyone? Want me to throw in some stats on Japan who are at over 200% of gdp in debt, haven't imploded and are paying negative real interest rates to convey my point and help you get your facts sorted out?
From the perspective of the UK the germans with their 60% of GDP debt looked very irresponsible, (compared to the UK at around 30), unless you really go back in the historical record and realize the UK floated along just fine at 150% of gdp debt for a century, but today the germans are doing well, the UK badly, thank you austerity.
Greece's debt situation was not bad. If they were on the Drachma still rather than the Euro it would *still* not be bad. The problem they have is a contracting economy (thanks to austerity) is making the debt worse, while putting people out of work and starving them of not only current revenue but future revenue as well.
Did they expect to load on debt ad infinitum to fund lavish welfare programs without any consequences?
Fantasy talking point but ok...? First of all their 'welfare' programmes were about the same as a percent of GDP as the french and germans, and secondly welfare is re-distributive in nature. Again, they were doing perfectly well balancing the books for a decade with their so lavish they could afford it social programmes.
so i guess you missed the fact they had no problem with lying their way into the monetary union
The government expenditures and GDP figures were not fabricated, everything else is irrelvant to this discussion.
Yup, everything would be rainbows and ponies if only zee germans left them alone.
You mean like how things have been working in iceland, Denmnark, even the UK until Osborne and his foolish austerity? Don't get me wrong, the greeks got themselves into this mess of the Euro experiment, but the Germans are the de-facto leaders and paymasters of europe, and they ultimately hold the keys to the solution because of that, and it's german banks that lent money to the periphery in the first place, so it's german banks that will be on the hook if Greece and Spain and Italy etc. all default. If Greece hadn't joined the Euro (and by extension they were then left alone by the germans) then yes, things would be a lot better than they are. They'd be like the united states bitching about not enough job growth, and a not fast enough recovery, rather than trying to figure out how much more their economy is going to contract next year.
And don't misunderstand me, the german solution of federalism is the right one for europe ultimately. But it's political fantasy, and it doesn't seem like Merkel is able to make it into a reality through force of personality the way some other politician perhaps could. Without that, and without a significant transfer of powers to brussels this whole Euro experiment is doomed.
If you want a german comparison, look at east germany. There are *still*, 30 years on, significant transfer payments from the west to east within germany, but east germany is not rapidly contracting, and germany as a whole is not struggling to take on debt to pay for east german debt, because the rich areas are propping up the poor ones. If europe isn't willing to go that route they should stop trying to be a single country.
So, I, by coincidence, just did a cost of living analysis for where I am versus the nearest big city.
A 55k/year income has the same spending power as a 75k income an hour and a half away. If you compare two cities, like San Fran and San Antonio you have almost a factor of 2 difference, housing in San Fran is about 2.5x the cost of San Antonio, but cars aren't 2.5x as much, etc. etc.
Also, I was trying to be informative, not commentary. Different places have wildly different costs and pay, you can't peg down a single number. I agree, teaching is not very lucrative - because teacher pay tends to bind all teachers with 4 year degrees to the same pay, even if one is in Drama and the other in computer science. For the Drama major teaching is far far far more lucrative than they could get on average anywhere else, for a CS grad it's probably a 35 or 40% pay cut, all else being equal. And teaching is becoming a shitty job, there's this nonsense perception that teachers are vastly overpaid, which as you point out, they aren't, and then there are the complexities of managing bigger and bigger classrooms etc.
So sure, teaching isn't for me, but you *can* make a living wage as a teacher, assuming you get full time, and assuming you can stick around for a few years. It's not as good as being a web developer, but you get more job security, usually a better pension, you get vacation at all the right times when you have kids etc. I tend to favour the 'web developer' option, but I can see the appeal of the other choice.
True, but that doesn't mean there isn't the possibility that Ballmer is right.
They probably looked at people who *aren't* buying iPads, and saying "what do you want?" and the answer was a highly portable keyboard, and regular desktop programs. The latter isn't an issue for the ipad exactly, and Microsoft hasn't pulled a great job by forking x86 and ARM and all that stuff, but I can see the argument that a laptop that easily doubles as a slate is more appealing than a slate by itself (to use the MS parlance of slate rather than tablet).
ANd the thing is, this isn't really news that MS feels this way. They've been pushing convertible tablets for years, I've had several over the last 7 or 8 years, surface is like that, only adopting a slate form factor.
That doesn't mean any of this will actually sell well, or that their attempt at a solution is a good idea. But this is certainly the same line of thinking that MS has been pushing since the Bill Gates days.
where are you that teachers make $80K? That does not jive with national salary rates.
Senior teachers. Average teacher pay is no where near 80k, and starting teacher pay is less than half of that. But if you can get a job in teaching and stay in the profession for 25 or 30 years you can get up to 70 or 80 in big cities.
One of my highshool buddies is about 65k, and that's after 10 years. His cost of living makes that not really a great salary for the area, but it's not bad.
but I really understand Germans looking at the problem and just thinking its better to kick Greeks out of Euro
Half of germany have buried their heads in the sand and believe it's some moral failure of the greeks in not paying their debts which has nothing to do with reality, the other half are living in a fantasy land of using this as leverage to force federalism "we'll give you money if you give power to brussels" so to speak. Germans of course, being descended from a federation of independent kingdoms doesn't have the same problem with federalism as everyone else in the euro area.
How fair is that? That its German taxes that will save a country that despite being in a fucked situation can not at least start pretending to be serious with tax?
And this puts you in the crowd of wanting to believe this is some great moral failure of the greeks. Their taxes as a % of gdp and spending as a % of GDP were not radically different from the rest of the euro area for the last decade, you're just buying rhetoric that wants people to feel good about forcing more and more austerity on them, and trying to destroy their country from the outside.
People need to learn that taxes are unavoidable in life.
People need to learn that every tax that can be avoided will be. Part of constructing a good tax code (that properly distributes tax burdens, properly defined however you want) is making sure you plan for loopholes. Europe has always had a problem with switzerland and the city states being tax havens, it's not like germans haven't been hiding their money in Switzerland and Lichtenstein for the the last 2 centuries after all, but they've learned to cope with it as best they can.
But yes, individually greece (portugal, spain etc.) having debt in euro's is about as good as having debt in US dollars, a currency they don't control, don't have a source of enough of, and no way to ease their way out of it.
Greece thankfully is an insignificant part of the Eurozone
True, but not. Greece is the first victim of a problem that will hit everyone in the Euro without reform. Even if there were only two countries in the Euro one of the two would have the same basic problem that greece has - they're forcibly less competitive than the other one, and they aren't getting enough payments out of it.
Really you can't spend more money than you raise in taxes forever, sooner or later it comes back to bite you.
Aside from the fact that british did that for 250 year and are still doing it and their country hasn't imploded - so your statement is factually untrue, that isn't the issue anyway. Greece's debt situation is directly related to being on the Euro, if they weren't on the Euro their debt wouldn't be a problem, and they would have likely had an actual recovery and not further depression.
The euro isn't threatened by Greece staying or going, they're too small to actually matter much. The Euro is threatened by what caused Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain to be in serious messes, which is the same problem that will eventually chip away at all of the countries that aren't germany - germany is the strongest economy in the Euro area, and the biggest, so they will be dragged down by everyone else eventually, but Euro policy rests on german exports.
The Euro was constructed with the idea that they would get a currency and settle the political and fiscal (EU budget powers basically) issues later. Because the Uk wasn't going along with one provision or another, other people wanted their own deals, no one really wanted to transfer power to Brussels, because, as you rightfully point out, they're not apparently doing a very good job.
Unfortunately, that system isn't sustainable, it happened to hit Greece, and Ireland and Spain and Portugal first, but the problem is fundamental to the EU and Euro area, and is not going to go away if greece is gone. Greece leaving the Euro area would be good for greece ultimately, though obviously the transition would be... unpleasant.
There is a legitimate point that inflation is what Greece, Spain, Italy and Portual need. Now ideally they would get there from a eurozone inflation of target of 4% and ease through this gradually (as the US generally has), but the other option will be for the Eurozone to break up, and they would likely be first to be kicked out (unless the germans leave first, which would help too).
Inflation devalues debt. Since one persons debt is anothers holding you can see the issue. But of course most people don't have a lot of money in cash assets. They have houses and stocks and so on.
Rightly, what he's complaining about is that reducing the value of a currency can make your labour worth less. This is true, and tied in concept to something in economics called nominal wage rigidity. Basically no one wants to take a face value pay cut. So to make your economy more competitive (more exports, more tourists, less imports, less of your people touring elsewhere) you want to reduce your own costs, and one way to do that is inflation.
Greece is essentially a balance of payments problem, all of the euro area is, combined with a monetary but not a fiscal union. If it wasn't for defence, medicare and medicaid and social security being *federal* in the US a lot of states would be in deep trouble right now. But because relatively rich areas keep sending money to poorer areas (especially areas that are poor because of the housing bubble and the now market bubble). What the greeks need is to decrease their costs relative to germany to attract investment, or get direct payments from germany. Either would work. The first, when in the Euro, is a mess, the Euro area could aim for a larger inflation target, essentially they'd decrease costs against everyone else at least, Greece might not be more competitive against germany but it would at least be more competitive against the US and Japan and China. The latter, which is essentially what the germans are talking about, European Federalism, seems to be a non starter politically.
So sure, he's shilling gold, and gold isn't a hedge against anything, it's just a metal that varies wildly in price, in part based on fears about inflation. Small persistent inflation (fiat currencies trend down) is a feature, not a defect of the system. But there's a kernel of truth to the fact that a lot of people in europe are looking at greece and figuring they want to having their money somewhere else, because if the Euro area starts kicking people out rather than actually solving problems a lot of people are going to get really fucked in the short term, and there they really might be better with bars of metal than cash. Incidentally, as other people have pointed out, this reality is why the barter system is picked back up, and is preventing major investment, so between that and austerity greece is only going to get worse unless there's some serious credible move towards an actual european solution, and given that, bars of any metal, even iron might be better than Greece Euros.
assuming they had been able to maintain the decline to the level of 150 million units that they had originally forecast
Forecasts like that are why they are in the mess they are in. Symbian was going to be killed off as a product, anyone with a brain should have realized that was going to cause the market for symbian devices to tank.
The whole thing is gibberish anyway, MS wasn't particularly stopping them from shipping symbian devices - as long as the OS wasn't brought up to parity, it just wanted them to stay away from Android.
HTC is basically an example of why Windows phone might be good for nokia. If Nokia can't compete with samsung on android they need to do so elsewhere.
Nokia's problem was that they really didn't have compelling software for the future. That was clearly iOS, Android or Windows phone (and probably not all 3, and probably not anything else). They can't do iOS. So that left 'just another android maker' which, while certainly possible, didn't seem like a great strategy - and it hasn't worked well for HTC, or be the lead windows phones guys and get a boatload of money from microsoft.
The thing with being 'just another android maker' is that people can immediately jump ship if your product is even marginally worse than the competition, it's like first past the post voting the guy with 50% + 1 votes gets 100% of the power, well, if you look at the hardware Nokia has been releasing for windows phone, frankly, they're a generation behind the competition (at least). That's bad. Very bad. As an android maker they could be losing money like crazy *and* not getting a cheque from microsoft.
As it is, they made the long play gamble. If windows 8 takes off, especially if microsoft can pitch some sort of integrated microsoft entertainment experience that people can actually tangibly understand (and tied into xbl and business productivity etc.) they could be in the right place when the time comes. I'm not a fan of windows 8, but that doesn't mean the market as a whole will agree with me, and basically everyone may as well read tea leaves to find out if this is going to go well or not.
At some point it might be. Why do you need to have a physical computer if your phone can dock with and power a decent sized monitor and keyboard. Then you can take all of your information etc. with you everywhere, and it can be backed up to a server in your house/office, so if you lose your phone you get issued a new one and voila, all of your data and settings.
The thing is, we're not really far away from that being a very reasonable possibility. My Galaxy SII has more than enough horsepower for all standard desktop word processing/web browsing needs currently. The software isn't there yet, but the hardware is certainly capable.
Have a look at http://xolo.in/xolo-x900-specifications
That's a real phone for sale in india, it's an x86 intel branded and made phone. It has a 1.6 GHz atom processor. It's probably not quite where you'd want a laptop to be, but in not too many years they certainly could be at that level.
I don't think anything in your post is accurate. But thank you for the attempt at feedback.
I appreciate what you're trying to get at, but C# isn't a virtual machine like java. You're on the right track, that Apps is an antiquated concept and we shouldn't be tying functionality to a specific OS when we have the web, but people buy apps, by the dozens, so people make and sell apps.
I don't have to do ANY extra work to get code additions to compile for
As I explicitly stated, that's MS's intention with being able to recompile for ARM vs x86, but you still needed a compiler to do it, and a reason to click the button to make it happen. Windows is more than just the operating system itself, it's the ecosystem that surrounds it and the developer interactions. They could have released an ARM compatible visual studio 5 years ago for all it matters, but I doubt anyone would have bothered with clicking the 'complie for ARM' button, even if there was literally 0 extra work involved.
Yes, you can rewrite GLUT in a weekend, but you're going to have different performance characteristics across platforms. That *might* be an issue - it depends very much on the specifics of what you're doing. MS's x86/ARM thing could work 95% of the time perfectly with one button, and 5% of the time require major code rewrites due to timing differences between the two types of CPU's or god knows what. I just don't know, because I'm not trying to build anything for ARM and importantly, test it.
Right, people who don't think electricity and technology are magic spawned by the (literal) devil lean obama, and they're the xbox crowd. But even then, when both major parties agree that drone strike are in some form or another are the way to go, it's hard to see how anyone would expect the american public to be wildly out of step with that.
Drones are relatively new, and their spillover effects aren't apparent, the nonsense of how 'Civilian' vs 'combatant' deaths are counted with drone strikes (anyone near a terrorist is a terrorist) is a newer policy than drone strikes, and is mostly hurting a bunch of tribal guys in pakistan, it's not at all obvious to the average person, let alone xbox gamer, how this could end up being a bad thing. Even people who at least somewhat understand the risks of drone strikes can have the view that 'Pakistan harboured bin laden' and well, so might view pissing off the pakistani's as one of the benefits rather than a negative (I might disagree, but people could easily have that view).
I suspect if you hit the Xbox age group 15-40, mostly male, but semi-affluent (enough to afford a high def TV and Xbox 360) they probably lean obama anyway - Romney's demographic is angry old white people who believe the devil is real, or extremely rich people who think they should be more extremely rich, and that's just not the video gamer demographic.
And the thing is, MS is thinking long term. They don't want to be caught pants down 3 or 4 years from now if some ARM maker produces a chip that is serious competition to Intel.
The only way that future windows applications will work on both ARM and x86 is if people start developing for that now. They need just enough marketshare to warrant the added development time* for developers to make both an ARM and x86 version so that windows 9 or windows 10 on both will actually be appealing
*Supposedly it's just a simple recompile in visual studio. How well that will actually work in practice on applications that need optimization I don't know. I know where I am isn't worried about ARM versions of what we do atm, so I haven't had any justification for working on it.
Also the 3 year old doesn't have the years of working with Xp/7 to bog him down & set expectations of how the OS should work.
Nor do they use a computer to attempt to solve the same problems an adult does. A 3 year old might want to find one thing, based on pictures. My desktop is juggling 12 different applications right now, and I found them based on descriptions not based on images. The work hours spreadsheet and the game balance spreadsheet have the same icon, but the content is somewhat important. Windows 8 is a trainwreck because it's inconsistent in how it manages lots of things, if you only ever want to do one thing at a time it's fine. It's like my phone - me and a 5 year old could manage 99% of the use cases on my phone equally well, because I'm only rarely actually multitasking, and most everything complex is buried. But try and actually manage half a dozen running programs on windows 8 and you're jumping between UI's, trying to figure out which applications did and which didn't create icons on the traditional desktop. If you have several hundred programs installed (which is not btw, unreasonable on windows or linux), the 'metro' style can be much harder to navigate.
I agree with posters in reply, a lot of this is muscle memory, and changing that is hard - but the question is whether or not I benefit from it. If you try windows phone (which is essentially the basis for windows 8) it's interesting and different from the iPhone/Android style. I'm not sure better or worse overall, but it's certainly a different take on the same basic problem. And it works reasonably well at it (again, not sure better or worse than the alternative but definitely different). But windows 8 isn't just windows phone 8, losing productivity without any apparent pickup in productivity is troublesome. I've got a windows 8 convertible tablet, and it's a nightmare to use unfortunately, it's fast, which is good, but it can't decide how it's going to behave, so I think I'm going to roll the machine back to vista when the preview build gets shut off.
The bigger questions with windows 8, about the store (which conflicts with the open platform nature of windows, and pisses off their suppliers) and the big industry questions of whether forking windows into an x86 and ARM version is going to cause no end of confusion (does a 3 year old care? no, but you can bet a 63 year old buying a computer does), the 'Surface' initiative as either a good kick in the pants to the 3rd party hardware guys or sign of microsoft entering the hardware market are all things that are *bad*, and well beyond a 3 year old. A 3 year old can look at pictures and click on them - and that's what microsoft was aiming for, but that has no bearing on how to build a productivity desktop for 15-85 year olds.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, what about Microsoft prevents them from literally being unable to give their product away for free?
I grant that I always saw this as a bit strange. I think the point isn't browsers, browsers are just the lead in point on the platform. What's to stop MS from bundling in a store, and anti virus, an office suite a ..... ? If you let them control the entire experience you risk severely limiting consumer choice.
Browsers are important because we could end up back at the days of IE not doing anything standards compliant - could they basically railroad people into building a web that is only compatible with IE 16 (sort of like all the custom code paths for IE six).
Actually, this is a matter of breach of contract.
Sure, the contract only exists because of the anti competitive monopolistic practices, but yes, ultimately Microsoft agreed to do something and isn't. But the underlying idea that this is like the made up statistics about piracy is a bit misleading. These rules all exists, and these contracts all exist because of microsofts bad behaviour.
This is an anti trust issue rather than a theft one.
Are you abusing your monopoly power so competitors literally cannot give their product away for free - that's a competition issue. This is by the way, a business strategy, if you have enough money you can cut your prices enough, or sell a new product cheap enough, and make enough deals that no one can afford to buy your competitors product, but they can buy yours (even if that is incurring a loss for you). The issue with Microsoft is whether their 90% windows marketshare, which is essentially a monopoly is being abused to prevent other companies, such as mozilla, from staying in the market. If that is the case, we don't really want to end up in a world where there is one viable internet browser choice, and that's internet explorer.
Are you copying something for free that you legally should need to pay for - theft/piracy/counterfeiting/licensing whatever you want to call it issue.
But that's not a fair comparison. First of all it's a distribution thing with teachers, teachers who are new are not well off, those who've been around a while are doing ok.
But teachers have to have 3 or 4 year degrees from university + education training (so 4-5 years of post secondary education with decent marks), amongst their peer group, which would be engineers, writers, managers, editors etc. they're sort of middle of the road. Compared to generic english degree they're doing very well, compared to generic CS or Engineering degree they're doing poorly. That's problematic because if you want people to be educated in useful (high paying) things you need to find people educated in useful things willing to take a big pay cut for the privilege of teaching, and it's not really that appealing.
If you ever take engineering or CS in university you'll see that easily half the professorship are immigrants, and many of them have terrible english. Most of the domestic students don't even want to go into grad school let alone onto a professorship, it just doesn't pay well enough to warrant that choice. For a foreigner though it's a great way to get immigration and a steady job you can raise a family on. Our undergrad programme is 80% or so domestic (in many cases second generation, so it's full of indians and arabs and chinese guys who were born here), but our grad programme is about 85% foreign. Teaching, even university level teaching, has its advantages. But it's not nearly as lucrative as going off into industry if you have the skills, and if you don't have the skills (including the basic language or social skills) it's a very appealing career choice.
agreed, as much as I'm underwhelmed by the hardware, I see the thinking, software guys like me aren't taking advantage of quad core processors with 4GB of ram... so don't try and ship that. Ship something that is as good as the market needs at a low price.
Devaluing the Euro a little may actually HELP German exports by making their end products cheaper to foreign markets.
It would certainly, but german exports also bring the euro up as people buy euros to buy german stuff. I agree, I wasn't clear in what I was saying.
Also, with devaluation, everyone is trying to devalue against everyone else, which isn't possible, the Euro, Dollar, Pound, Yen and Yuan all want to devalue against each other, all at once, which sounds like the nonsense it is, countries with strong exports will have trouble losing value if they don't have a huge set of imports to offset against it.
Japan is picking up imports on energy, china on resources, the US on chinese made goods (and they're struggling to find exports), Europe is importing energy but not as much as it's 'exporting' tourism and cars I don't think, but I'd need to look up the data.
You seem to think the economic machinations of an entire continent can be summarised in 3 paragraphs
No, I think /. posts have to be contained to a sensible length.
including the formation of the single currency and its eventual demise
There's no particular reason the Euro has to break up, but it's not sustainable to have a single currency without significant combined fiscal policy. Even gold had the same issue because countries debased metal currencies.
I don't dispute that there is some complicated math I'm not even sure how to do to figure out just how big the combined fiscal policy needs to be to avoid crises like this. The US federal government flutters around 20% of GDP and it seems to manage to be big enough to buffer out a lot of the local serious crisis that plague europe. The EU budget of 1% of GDP seems to be too small to have much of an effect, and country budgets (e.g. in europe), like germany, France and Sweden are all much larger than 20% of GDP and they seem to be good enough as well. So experimentally the number seems to be more than 1, but 20% seems like enough - but you'd have to actually measure just how efficient the distributive effects are past that (the UK for example which doesn't have state/provincial governments at all, or at least didn't until devolution, would seem to be the extreme other end, where you can see all of the distributive effect). But I'm not sure.
And an actual legitimate change in the moral feeling of the world.
Had the UK canada and australia (and a few of the smaller countries) remained one big country we'd be much better off, but overall the morality of keeping africa and india simply made the whole thing impossible.
The flight of capital is what you want. You devalue greek currency and have german money flow in, which brings the greek currency up again... this is how free floating currencies work.
However if you want to look over the longer term, fair enough. Hows the empire doing? Good?
Very. If you sum up the individual value of their imperial territories from say 1800-1900, they are combined doing very well. Canada, Australia etc. are doing quite well, india is having ~7% growth rates. And the UK, despite only having 60 million people is still the 6th or 7th largest in the world and would be a notch higher if it wasn't for osbornes double austerity.
This is why Bank of England has been buying treasuries via 'quantitative easing'
This is making UK debt cheaper to have, and making the UK more competitive with europe and the rest of the world, so again, that's the right answer.
Were it not for the second round of austerity the UK would be doing as well as the US.
Who took those massive debts and spent everything on hookers and blow?
This would be your own 'fact's'
Greece
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-debt-to-gdp
Germany
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/government-debt-to-gdp
UK
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt-to-gdp
Italy
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/italy/government-debt-to-gdp
Notice how Greece and Italy have had pretty much the same debt to GDP since 1993, at just over 100% of gdp? And notice how neither of them started to explode until 2008 when the financial crisis hit everyone? Want me to throw in some stats on Japan who are at over 200% of gdp in debt, haven't imploded and are paying negative real interest rates to convey my point and help you get your facts sorted out?
From the perspective of the UK the germans with their 60% of GDP debt looked very irresponsible, (compared to the UK at around 30), unless you really go back in the historical record and realize the UK floated along just fine at 150% of gdp debt for a century, but today the germans are doing well, the UK badly, thank you austerity.
Greece's debt situation was not bad. If they were on the Drachma still rather than the Euro it would *still* not be bad. The problem they have is a contracting economy (thanks to austerity) is making the debt worse, while putting people out of work and starving them of not only current revenue but future revenue as well.
Did they expect to load on debt ad infinitum to fund lavish welfare programs without any consequences?
Fantasy talking point but ok...? First of all their 'welfare' programmes were about the same as a percent of GDP as the french and germans, and secondly welfare is re-distributive in nature. Again, they were doing perfectly well balancing the books for a decade with their so lavish they could afford it social programmes.
so i guess you missed the fact they had no problem with lying their way into the monetary union
The government expenditures and GDP figures were not fabricated, everything else is irrelvant to this discussion.
Yup, everything would be rainbows and ponies if only zee germans left them alone.
You mean like how things have been working in iceland, Denmnark, even the UK until Osborne and his foolish austerity? Don't get me wrong, the greeks got themselves into this mess of the Euro experiment, but the Germans are the de-facto leaders and paymasters of europe, and they ultimately hold the keys to the solution because of that, and it's german banks that lent money to the periphery in the first place, so it's german banks that will be on the hook if Greece and Spain and Italy etc. all default. If Greece hadn't joined the Euro (and by extension they were then left alone by the germans) then yes, things would be a lot better than they are. They'd be like the united states bitching about not enough job growth, and a not fast enough recovery, rather than trying to figure out how much more their economy is going to contract next year.
And don't misunderstand me, the german solution of federalism is the right one for europe ultimately. But it's political fantasy, and it doesn't seem like Merkel is able to make it into a reality through force of personality the way some other politician perhaps could. Without that, and without a significant transfer of powers to brussels this whole Euro experiment is doomed.
If you want a german comparison, look at east germany. There are *still*, 30 years on, significant transfer payments from the west to east within germany, but east germany is not rapidly contracting, and germany as a whole is not struggling to take on debt to pay for east german debt, because the rich areas are propping up the poor ones. If europe isn't willing to go that route they should stop trying to be a single country.
So, I, by coincidence, just did a cost of living analysis for where I am versus the nearest big city.
A 55k/year income has the same spending power as a 75k income an hour and a half away. If you compare two cities, like San Fran and San Antonio you have almost a factor of 2 difference, housing in San Fran is about 2.5x the cost of San Antonio, but cars aren't 2.5x as much, etc. etc.
Also, I was trying to be informative, not commentary. Different places have wildly different costs and pay, you can't peg down a single number. I agree, teaching is not very lucrative - because teacher pay tends to bind all teachers with 4 year degrees to the same pay, even if one is in Drama and the other in computer science. For the Drama major teaching is far far far more lucrative than they could get on average anywhere else, for a CS grad it's probably a 35 or 40% pay cut, all else being equal. And teaching is becoming a shitty job, there's this nonsense perception that teachers are vastly overpaid, which as you point out, they aren't, and then there are the complexities of managing bigger and bigger classrooms etc.
So sure, teaching isn't for me, but you *can* make a living wage as a teacher, assuming you get full time, and assuming you can stick around for a few years. It's not as good as being a web developer, but you get more job security, usually a better pension, you get vacation at all the right times when you have kids etc. I tend to favour the 'web developer' option, but I can see the appeal of the other choice.
True, but that doesn't mean there isn't the possibility that Ballmer is right.
They probably looked at people who *aren't* buying iPads, and saying "what do you want?" and the answer was a highly portable keyboard, and regular desktop programs. The latter isn't an issue for the ipad exactly, and Microsoft hasn't pulled a great job by forking x86 and ARM and all that stuff, but I can see the argument that a laptop that easily doubles as a slate is more appealing than a slate by itself (to use the MS parlance of slate rather than tablet).
ANd the thing is, this isn't really news that MS feels this way. They've been pushing convertible tablets for years, I've had several over the last 7 or 8 years, surface is like that, only adopting a slate form factor.
That doesn't mean any of this will actually sell well, or that their attempt at a solution is a good idea. But this is certainly the same line of thinking that MS has been pushing since the Bill Gates days.
where are you that teachers make $80K? That does not jive with national salary rates.
Senior teachers. Average teacher pay is no where near 80k, and starting teacher pay is less than half of that. But if you can get a job in teaching and stay in the profession for 25 or 30 years you can get up to 70 or 80 in big cities.
One of my highshool buddies is about 65k, and that's after 10 years. His cost of living makes that not really a great salary for the area, but it's not bad.
but I really understand Germans looking at the problem and just thinking its better to kick Greeks out of Euro
Half of germany have buried their heads in the sand and believe it's some moral failure of the greeks in not paying their debts which has nothing to do with reality, the other half are living in a fantasy land of using this as leverage to force federalism "we'll give you money if you give power to brussels" so to speak. Germans of course, being descended from a federation of independent kingdoms doesn't have the same problem with federalism as everyone else in the euro area.
How fair is that? That its German taxes that will save a country that despite being in a fucked situation can not at least start pretending to be serious with tax?
And this puts you in the crowd of wanting to believe this is some great moral failure of the greeks. Their taxes as a % of gdp and spending as a % of GDP were not radically different from the rest of the euro area for the last decade, you're just buying rhetoric that wants people to feel good about forcing more and more austerity on them, and trying to destroy their country from the outside.
People need to learn that taxes are unavoidable in life.
People need to learn that every tax that can be avoided will be. Part of constructing a good tax code (that properly distributes tax burdens, properly defined however you want) is making sure you plan for loopholes. Europe has always had a problem with switzerland and the city states being tax havens, it's not like germans haven't been hiding their money in Switzerland and Lichtenstein for the the last 2 centuries after all, but they've learned to cope with it as best they can.
Euro inflation would devalue their debt.
But yes, individually greece (portugal, spain etc.) having debt in euro's is about as good as having debt in US dollars, a currency they don't control, don't have a source of enough of, and no way to ease their way out of it.
Greece thankfully is an insignificant part of the Eurozone
True, but not. Greece is the first victim of a problem that will hit everyone in the Euro without reform. Even if there were only two countries in the Euro one of the two would have the same basic problem that greece has - they're forcibly less competitive than the other one, and they aren't getting enough payments out of it.
Really you can't spend more money than you raise in taxes forever, sooner or later it comes back to bite you.
Aside from the fact that british did that for 250 year and are still doing it and their country hasn't imploded - so your statement is factually untrue, that isn't the issue anyway. Greece's debt situation is directly related to being on the Euro, if they weren't on the Euro their debt wouldn't be a problem, and they would have likely had an actual recovery and not further depression.
The euro isn't threatened by Greece staying or going, they're too small to actually matter much. The Euro is threatened by what caused Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain to be in serious messes, which is the same problem that will eventually chip away at all of the countries that aren't germany - germany is the strongest economy in the Euro area, and the biggest, so they will be dragged down by everyone else eventually, but Euro policy rests on german exports.
The Euro was constructed with the idea that they would get a currency and settle the political and fiscal (EU budget powers basically) issues later. Because the Uk wasn't going along with one provision or another, other people wanted their own deals, no one really wanted to transfer power to Brussels, because, as you rightfully point out, they're not apparently doing a very good job.
Unfortunately, that system isn't sustainable, it happened to hit Greece, and Ireland and Spain and Portugal first, but the problem is fundamental to the EU and Euro area, and is not going to go away if greece is gone. Greece leaving the Euro area would be good for greece ultimately, though obviously the transition would be... unpleasant.
There is a legitimate point that inflation is what Greece, Spain, Italy and Portual need. Now ideally they would get there from a eurozone inflation of target of 4% and ease through this gradually (as the US generally has), but the other option will be for the Eurozone to break up, and they would likely be first to be kicked out (unless the germans leave first, which would help too).
Inflation devalues debt. Since one persons debt is anothers holding you can see the issue. But of course most people don't have a lot of money in cash assets. They have houses and stocks and so on.
Rightly, what he's complaining about is that reducing the value of a currency can make your labour worth less. This is true, and tied in concept to something in economics called nominal wage rigidity. Basically no one wants to take a face value pay cut. So to make your economy more competitive (more exports, more tourists, less imports, less of your people touring elsewhere) you want to reduce your own costs, and one way to do that is inflation.
Greece is essentially a balance of payments problem, all of the euro area is, combined with a monetary but not a fiscal union. If it wasn't for defence, medicare and medicaid and social security being *federal* in the US a lot of states would be in deep trouble right now. But because relatively rich areas keep sending money to poorer areas (especially areas that are poor because of the housing bubble and the now market bubble). What the greeks need is to decrease their costs relative to germany to attract investment, or get direct payments from germany. Either would work. The first, when in the Euro, is a mess, the Euro area could aim for a larger inflation target, essentially they'd decrease costs against everyone else at least, Greece might not be more competitive against germany but it would at least be more competitive against the US and Japan and China. The latter, which is essentially what the germans are talking about, European Federalism, seems to be a non starter politically.
So sure, he's shilling gold, and gold isn't a hedge against anything, it's just a metal that varies wildly in price, in part based on fears about inflation. Small persistent inflation (fiat currencies trend down) is a feature, not a defect of the system. But there's a kernel of truth to the fact that a lot of people in europe are looking at greece and figuring they want to having their money somewhere else, because if the Euro area starts kicking people out rather than actually solving problems a lot of people are going to get really fucked in the short term, and there they really might be better with bars of metal than cash. Incidentally, as other people have pointed out, this reality is why the barter system is picked back up, and is preventing major investment, so between that and austerity greece is only going to get worse unless there's some serious credible move towards an actual european solution, and given that, bars of any metal, even iron might be better than Greece Euros.
assuming they had been able to maintain the decline to the level of 150 million units that they had originally forecast
Forecasts like that are why they are in the mess they are in. Symbian was going to be killed off as a product, anyone with a brain should have realized that was going to cause the market for symbian devices to tank.
The whole thing is gibberish anyway, MS wasn't particularly stopping them from shipping symbian devices - as long as the OS wasn't brought up to parity, it just wanted them to stay away from Android.
HTC is basically an example of why Windows phone might be good for nokia. If Nokia can't compete with samsung on android they need to do so elsewhere.
Nokia's problem was that they really didn't have compelling software for the future. That was clearly iOS, Android or Windows phone (and probably not all 3, and probably not anything else). They can't do iOS. So that left 'just another android maker' which, while certainly possible, didn't seem like a great strategy - and it hasn't worked well for HTC, or be the lead windows phones guys and get a boatload of money from microsoft.
The thing with being 'just another android maker' is that people can immediately jump ship if your product is even marginally worse than the competition, it's like first past the post voting the guy with 50% + 1 votes gets 100% of the power, well, if you look at the hardware Nokia has been releasing for windows phone, frankly, they're a generation behind the competition (at least). That's bad. Very bad. As an android maker they could be losing money like crazy *and* not getting a cheque from microsoft.
As it is, they made the long play gamble. If windows 8 takes off, especially if microsoft can pitch some sort of integrated microsoft entertainment experience that people can actually tangibly understand (and tied into xbl and business productivity etc.) they could be in the right place when the time comes. I'm not a fan of windows 8, but that doesn't mean the market as a whole will agree with me, and basically everyone may as well read tea leaves to find out if this is going to go well or not.
At some point it might be. Why do you need to have a physical computer if your phone can dock with and power a decent sized monitor and keyboard. Then you can take all of your information etc. with you everywhere, and it can be backed up to a server in your house/office, so if you lose your phone you get issued a new one and voila, all of your data and settings.
The thing is, we're not really far away from that being a very reasonable possibility. My Galaxy SII has more than enough horsepower for all standard desktop word processing/web browsing needs currently. The software isn't there yet, but the hardware is certainly capable.
Have a look at http://xolo.in/xolo-x900-specifications
That's a real phone for sale in india, it's an x86 intel branded and made phone. It has a 1.6 GHz atom processor. It's probably not quite where you'd want a laptop to be, but in not too many years they certainly could be at that level.
I don't think anything in your post is accurate. But thank you for the attempt at feedback.
I appreciate what you're trying to get at, but C# isn't a virtual machine like java. You're on the right track, that Apps is an antiquated concept and we shouldn't be tying functionality to a specific OS when we have the web, but people buy apps, by the dozens, so people make and sell apps.
I don't have to do ANY extra work to get code additions to compile for
As I explicitly stated, that's MS's intention with being able to recompile for ARM vs x86, but you still needed a compiler to do it, and a reason to click the button to make it happen. Windows is more than just the operating system itself, it's the ecosystem that surrounds it and the developer interactions. They could have released an ARM compatible visual studio 5 years ago for all it matters, but I doubt anyone would have bothered with clicking the 'complie for ARM' button, even if there was literally 0 extra work involved.
Yes, you can rewrite GLUT in a weekend, but you're going to have different performance characteristics across platforms. That *might* be an issue - it depends very much on the specifics of what you're doing. MS's x86/ARM thing could work 95% of the time perfectly with one button, and 5% of the time require major code rewrites due to timing differences between the two types of CPU's or god knows what. I just don't know, because I'm not trying to build anything for ARM and importantly, test it.
Right, people who don't think electricity and technology are magic spawned by the (literal) devil lean obama, and they're the xbox crowd. But even then, when both major parties agree that drone strike are in some form or another are the way to go, it's hard to see how anyone would expect the american public to be wildly out of step with that.
Drones are relatively new, and their spillover effects aren't apparent, the nonsense of how 'Civilian' vs 'combatant' deaths are counted with drone strikes (anyone near a terrorist is a terrorist) is a newer policy than drone strikes, and is mostly hurting a bunch of tribal guys in pakistan, it's not at all obvious to the average person, let alone xbox gamer, how this could end up being a bad thing. Even people who at least somewhat understand the risks of drone strikes can have the view that 'Pakistan harboured bin laden' and well, so might view pissing off the pakistani's as one of the benefits rather than a negative (I might disagree, but people could easily have that view).
I suspect if you hit the Xbox age group 15-40, mostly male, but semi-affluent (enough to afford a high def TV and Xbox 360) they probably lean obama anyway - Romney's demographic is angry old white people who believe the devil is real, or extremely rich people who think they should be more extremely rich, and that's just not the video gamer demographic.
And the thing is, MS is thinking long term. They don't want to be caught pants down 3 or 4 years from now if some ARM maker produces a chip that is serious competition to Intel.
The only way that future windows applications will work on both ARM and x86 is if people start developing for that now. They need just enough marketshare to warrant the added development time* for developers to make both an ARM and x86 version so that windows 9 or windows 10 on both will actually be appealing
*Supposedly it's just a simple recompile in visual studio. How well that will actually work in practice on applications that need optimization I don't know. I know where I am isn't worried about ARM versions of what we do atm, so I haven't had any justification for working on it.
like stealing 600 dollar candy from a baby.
Unless you live in places that block stolen phones, which apparently has put a damper on a lot of cell phone theft.
Also the 3 year old doesn't have the years of working with Xp/7 to bog him down & set expectations of how the OS should work.
Nor do they use a computer to attempt to solve the same problems an adult does. A 3 year old might want to find one thing, based on pictures. My desktop is juggling 12 different applications right now, and I found them based on descriptions not based on images. The work hours spreadsheet and the game balance spreadsheet have the same icon, but the content is somewhat important. Windows 8 is a trainwreck because it's inconsistent in how it manages lots of things, if you only ever want to do one thing at a time it's fine. It's like my phone - me and a 5 year old could manage 99% of the use cases on my phone equally well, because I'm only rarely actually multitasking, and most everything complex is buried. But try and actually manage half a dozen running programs on windows 8 and you're jumping between UI's, trying to figure out which applications did and which didn't create icons on the traditional desktop. If you have several hundred programs installed (which is not btw, unreasonable on windows or linux), the 'metro' style can be much harder to navigate.
I agree with posters in reply, a lot of this is muscle memory, and changing that is hard - but the question is whether or not I benefit from it. If you try windows phone (which is essentially the basis for windows 8) it's interesting and different from the iPhone/Android style. I'm not sure better or worse overall, but it's certainly a different take on the same basic problem. And it works reasonably well at it (again, not sure better or worse than the alternative but definitely different). But windows 8 isn't just windows phone 8, losing productivity without any apparent pickup in productivity is troublesome. I've got a windows 8 convertible tablet, and it's a nightmare to use unfortunately, it's fast, which is good, but it can't decide how it's going to behave, so I think I'm going to roll the machine back to vista when the preview build gets shut off.
The bigger questions with windows 8, about the store (which conflicts with the open platform nature of windows, and pisses off their suppliers) and the big industry questions of whether forking windows into an x86 and ARM version is going to cause no end of confusion (does a 3 year old care? no, but you can bet a 63 year old buying a computer does), the 'Surface' initiative as either a good kick in the pants to the 3rd party hardware guys or sign of microsoft entering the hardware market are all things that are *bad*, and well beyond a 3 year old. A 3 year old can look at pictures and click on them - and that's what microsoft was aiming for, but that has no bearing on how to build a productivity desktop for 15-85 year olds.