You may try to fake out people with your historical revisionism, but your denial of the on going corporate holocaust is a fraud, as is your obvious lack of any historical knowledge. You may wish that "only" profits are involved, but our basic history as a nation proves otherwise, albeit nowadays it's ignored, and profits at any cost is your mantra.
Oh, please. I'm revising history? Money is what makes countries go 'round just as much as companies. The search for gold and other profitable imports is what spurred exploration throughout the middle of the last millennium, drove Europe's global empire-building, and led to the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere in the first place. Excessive taxation is what drove the American colonials to rebel against England as much as anything else.
If early corporations were kept in check by the American government, it's only because the government didn't need their money yet. Politics changed over the years, and the roles previously occupied by government itself was taken over and improved upon by private companies.
Your grasp of thirty-dollar-words notwithstanding, I find your argument wholly lacking. Heck, the entire argument for democratic government in the first place is because it uses individual greed and self-interest (namely, the desire to get re-elected by one's constituents) to create laws the public interest. Neither government nor business was ever, is ever, or will be ever assumed to act in "the public interest". Claiming they should is idealism at its most naive.
Erdos said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.
Isn't this practically a definition of Attention Deficit Disorder? As I recall, Ritalin is just a specific type of amphetamine. (And I know I have a heck of a time getting any coding done if I haven't taken mine.)
There are a few reasons why we think the Americans have no sense of irony. First, theirs is rather an optimistic culture, full of love of country and dewy-eyed self-belief and all the things that Europe's lost going through the war spindryer for the thousandth time.
Britain hasn't lost any of those things. They may not love their Prime Minister, but their (IMO, I am American after all) absurd fascination with their own royal family and general dislike of all intrusions American underscores a nationalism that is more bitter than American's, but no less devoted.
Our "dewy-eyed self-belief" is a result of global naivete combined with the biggest guns of any country on the planet. No surprises there.
Actually, I think Americans aren't ironic because we don't need to be. It's easier for us to actually say what we mean than to pretend to be cleverer than anyone else by saying the exact opposite.
Anyway. Ego mode off, back to your regularly scheduled planet.
Corporations inside the united states are also supposed to serve the public interest.
I'm sorry, you lost me from the first sentence. Where in your little pocket dimension did you get a wacko idea like that?
Corporations are supposed to serve their own financial interest, period. That's capitalism at its most basic. The only difference between a corporation and any other business is that a corporation is a legal person as far as the courts are concerned, but nowhere in that definition is "supposed to serve the public interest" written down.
Idealism is good, but get your dreams grounded in some kind of reality before you expect other people to ride along with you.
If they signed a Linux Bootloader that would be an endorsment of a way to loose money
This assumes that scads of people start buying XBoxen just to run Linux on it. Last I checked, the majority of people bought one primarily so they could play "Halo".
Or do you really think that all this is just so people can play "Tux Racer" on their HDTV sets?
The article also says the US military seems to think Microsofts security problems were not significant enough to stop the deal.
Although I'm sure several individuals in the Middle East are wringing their hands with glee right now. One or two well-constructed worm viruses and half the Army officers could be emailing their critical documents right to them. I hope the Army saved a few bucks for a killer firewall as well....
Wi-Fi is for $1000 PCs, cellular is for $100 phones. Wi-Fi is for broadband data, cellular is for voice and, at best, low bandwidth video on tiny screens. Wi-Fi has a short radius and an IP address, cellular towers are ubiquitous and compatible with several voice networks.
How can these be said to compete? Sure, you can do a lot of PC-ish things on your dinky cell phone, but you can't do half the things a PC on Wi-Fi can over a cellular connection. The cost-per-megabyte is only half the issue. It'll be a long time before mobile phone networks can approach the bandwidth of wireless networking, and by the time they do Wi-Fi will have leapfrogged to a whole 'nother level.
There's a lot of growth in the buck-a-minute world of cell phone downloads and uploads. People are getting innovative, too -- I've seen blogs composed mostly of photos with some short text uploaded from people's phones, and my wife uses hers as an organizer, storing names, phone numbers, addresses and alarms. As more and more phones are sync-able with people's PCs, they'll become more popular as MP3 players as well as download tools.
So this is cool, although we all know there's a plateau out there somewhere and several phone companies will crash hard when they run off the edge of it. But so what? Wi-Fi won't lose marketshare to phone makers because it can do so much more (bandwidth, public hotspots) and so much less (limited radius, hub tied to a physical landline). There's overlap, but it's less than the article implies. Until cellular phones can do everything a laptop PC can do -- and with those tiny screens and thumb-only keyboards, that's not too likely -- there's plenty of room for both.
but what's "great" is so relative and single track downloads almost creates a pop-only market.
No, the music industry gave us a pop-only market in the form of radio stations that play whatever song their paid to play. This is simply karmic retribution.
Linkin Park recently pulled its music as a singles offering from digital services.... Other acts with similar stipulations about their work include Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day
In other words, artists who have millions of CD sales already under their belt are complaining about people downloading the one or three songs they like instead of the entire album for $10-$15, because they're the ones who can afford to complain. But they certainly don't speak for the entire music industry, and I scarcely think they have a right to.
A singles-oriented model only has the possibility of hurting the bottom line of acts who already have a worldwide following in the millions of dollars. The idea is to sell songs by artists who may not be able to sell entire CDs as easily. As Neophytus said, 12 cents is certainly a step up from the status quo for any band who can't afford to renegotiate their own contracts from a position of strength.
This is listed in the manual, which you are right, is a very poorly done Korean effort....which leads me to wonder if Americans have some kind of patent on bad English grammar.
I dropped my subscription to NetFlix sometime last year and replaced it with GreenCine, even though they were slightly more expensive and took longer to ship to me. Why? Selection.
I liked getting anime DVDs from Netflix, but the way they kept buying only the first two or three DVDs of a six- or eight-disc series annoyed the frick out of me. I found GreenCine after a short search at Yahoo, and the site promised a greater selection of independent and anime rentals -- and they were absolutely right.
My point is, the real advantage of the online rental market should be greater selection of eclectic titles. Have you ever shopped for movies at Wal-Mart? Mainstream stuff all the way. Their CD selection is even worse. I started buying books and CDs from Amazon.com not for the prices, but because their selection was that much better, even if I lost the advantage of immediate gratification.
If people want to rent mainstream videos, then they'll always do it at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, where they're promised "guaranteed in stock" even if they only keep it for two nights. Immediacy is more important than "keep it as long as you like" in most consumers' minds; if it weren't, we wouldn't have movie channels on cable TV at all.
So kudos to Wal-Mart for entering a new arena (for them), and may NetFlix be driven to excel even more because of it. But until they both realize the real advantages of what they're doing and offer a wider and more complete selection, I'll happily ignore them both.
Apple may be marginalized, but they're the ones on the consumer end who keep building the bridges Microsoft has to walk across. No new technology coming forward? Apple built their own with the iPod. They were late to the game with iTunes, granted, but iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD are still leaps and bounds ahead of any competition in terms of ease-of-use.
The "digital hub" strategy they're embracing is working very well for Apple. The only problem, natch, is that digital camcorders (and camcorders and DVD burners) are still too expensive to be casually embraced by most consumers. But then, prices are getting lower all the time -- simple digital cameras under $100 are easy to come by, and used iPods can be found on eBay for as low as $100-$150. Apple knows that people are doing less and less with their personal computers but more and more with the other "computers" around them, and constantly works on ways to tie those peripherals to Apple's hardware and software.
What Microsoft ought to be throwing it's money towards, then, is building easy-to-use consumer software that consumers actually *want* to use, not because they're gimmicky but because they're easy to understand. Media Player is a good start. Their video editor needs much work, and integrating it with the ever-cheaper DVD burners and VideoCD writers could only help them.
Then let's try some new ideas, just to see if they take off. Skip the Tablet PC thing; build a cheap (like $50-$60) e-book reader that people can actually afford and will want to own, then get the magazine and newspaper publishers to sign on. Try to really integrate webcams and IM. A Flash-format animation creator for under $50 so people can make their own cartoons. They don't have to give this stuff away with the OS, if they make it cheap enough to buy separately. (I'm keen on that $50 price point, which is the most your average consumer will spend on non-profit-making software.)
Microsoft is, IMO, so bent on keeping the business markets that they've all but neglected their consumer market. Aside from some pretty colors, self-customizing menus and Apple-chasing software hacks, they've not done anything new for the home market since Windows 95 was released. It's good for them to spend time building tools that developers and managers want to have, but it helps their image immensely to add the stuff home users would want to have -- even if they don't make as much profit from it.
For the same time period, both major pattern makers referred scores of customers to Monsterpatterns as a great source for discontinued patterns. These referrals came by way of email and telephone from Simplicity and McCall employees.
While this doesn't qualify as official company policy (employees referring customers to the site on their own, rather than the company telling the employees to refer them), I think it badly undermines the pattern companies' case. Obviously they knew about the site for a long time, they knew what it did and what it offered, and they turned a blind eye towards it.
Suddenly, some lawyer realizes it might be grounds for a quick courtroom profit and announces they're suing under (of all things) the DCMA. As if throwing boxes in the trash could possibly constitute encryption....
Six Degrees by Creo is another attempt to do this same sort of thing, except that it's commercial and it's been available for Mac OS X and Windows for several months.
Apple picked $0.99 because it's a critical price point in the minds of consumers. It's as high as you can get and be less than a dollar, and $1.00 is already considered a pittance by most consumers -- especially those used to $15 CDs.
On the average, most consumers won't differentiate between $0.89 and $0.99, any more than they'd shop at a different store to pay $11.89 instead of $11.99. Even $0.75 isn't such an improvement over $0.99 psychologically speaking -- a competitor would have to go as low as $0.50, or close to it, to take customers from Apple on price alone.
Besides, we're selling bits here, not products. "Razor-thin margins" don't actually exist with virtual merchandise. Apple's had a nationwide network for distributing media quickly for some time now -- specifically, for QuickTime movie trailers -- and *that* was for zero profits. All they can do with this store is make money.
If you argue "that's too complicated!", you probably don't want an iso image of a compile-from-source linux distro in the first place.
I thought the whole point of a LiveCD was to simplify the process in the first place? I can burn an ISO to CD using Toast 5 just fine, and don't even need a command line to do it.
This isn't the first time someone's complained about geocaching in public-owned lands. Ideally, geocaching wouldn't produce any problems -- you locate the stash, extract it, exchange one item for your own, and re-stash it -- except that the fun of geocaching comes when you have to hunt a bit. That sometimes means digging up the ground, climbing (and re-climbing) trees, or otherwise moving or stressing things that shouldn't be constantly moved or stressed.
The Petrified Forest National Park in the U.S. doesn't allow visitors to pick up bits of petrified wood off the ground, asking them to buy it from the gift shop instead, because it would eventually lead to the removal of all the small samples that make the place what it is. Imagine geocachers roaming and digging all around that place.
Sometimes, preserving natural beauty means inconveniencing the same visitors who've come to see it. I don't consider this unreasonable, since there's still thousands of acres of land, public and unowned, that geocachers can still use. They may not be as scenic to get to, that's all.
Microsoft and AOL/Time Warner are running fast to get their own online Apple-like music store up and running, now that Apple's has been the success it has been -- doubly so since Apple's planning a Windows version of iTunes and the music store by the end of the year. Microsoft could probably beat them to market with a shoddy music store without even sweating.
So Apple needs to get ahead and stay ahead. To do that, ease-of-use isn't enough (or Apple would have the 95% user share, not Microsoft) -- they need to have the biggest, most comprehensive, most searchable library of online music anywhere. Consumers won't get iTunes if Microsoft's store is already installed, but they will get it if iTunes offers three times more songs.
I think that once Apple gets a large number of indie labels in the store, the rest will eventually come on their own. That, plus a $100 iPod of any size, will be all they'll need to stay ahead of the competition for some time to come.
Slashdot Mirror
You may try to fake out people with your historical revisionism, but your denial of the on going corporate holocaust is a fraud, as is your obvious lack of any historical knowledge. You may wish that "only" profits are involved, but our basic history as a nation proves otherwise, albeit nowadays it's ignored, and profits at any cost is your mantra.
Oh, please. I'm revising history? Money is what makes countries go 'round just as much as companies. The search for gold and other profitable imports is what spurred exploration throughout the middle of the last millennium, drove Europe's global empire-building, and led to the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere in the first place. Excessive taxation is what drove the American colonials to rebel against England as much as anything else.
If early corporations were kept in check by the American government, it's only because the government didn't need their money yet. Politics changed over the years, and the roles previously occupied by government itself was taken over and improved upon by private companies.
Your grasp of thirty-dollar-words notwithstanding, I find your argument wholly lacking. Heck, the entire argument for democratic government in the first place is because it uses individual greed and self-interest (namely, the desire to get re-elected by one's constituents) to create laws the public interest. Neither government nor business was ever, is ever, or will be ever assumed to act in "the public interest". Claiming they should is idealism at its most naive.
Erdos said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.
Isn't this practically a definition of Attention Deficit Disorder? As I recall, Ritalin is just a specific type of amphetamine. (And I know I have a heck of a time getting any coding done if I haven't taken mine.)
There are a few reasons why we think the Americans have no sense of irony. First, theirs is rather an optimistic culture, full of love of country and dewy-eyed self-belief and all the things that Europe's lost going through the war spindryer for the thousandth time.
Britain hasn't lost any of those things. They may not love their Prime Minister, but their (IMO, I am American after all) absurd fascination with their own royal family and general dislike of all intrusions American underscores a nationalism that is more bitter than American's, but no less devoted.
Our "dewy-eyed self-belief" is a result of global naivete combined with the biggest guns of any country on the planet. No surprises there.
Actually, I think Americans aren't ironic because we don't need to be. It's easier for us to actually say what we mean than to pretend to be cleverer than anyone else by saying the exact opposite.
Anyway. Ego mode off, back to your regularly scheduled planet.
Corporations inside the united states are also supposed to serve the public interest.
I'm sorry, you lost me from the first sentence. Where in your little pocket dimension did you get a wacko idea like that?
Corporations are supposed to serve their own financial interest, period. That's capitalism at its most basic. The only difference between a corporation and any other business is that a corporation is a legal person as far as the courts are concerned, but nowhere in that definition is "supposed to serve the public interest" written down.
Idealism is good, but get your dreams grounded in some kind of reality before you expect other people to ride along with you.
If they signed a Linux Bootloader that would be an endorsment of a way to loose money
This assumes that scads of people start buying XBoxen just to run Linux on it. Last I checked, the majority of people bought one primarily so they could play "Halo".
Or do you really think that all this is just so people can play "Tux Racer" on their HDTV sets?
That would be so boring. I mean, the x-rays can't penetrate dense materials, so you'd never be able to see what's running inside all those PC boxes.
His words served as a segue into his description of a new Microsoft Corp. application, called Regional Automated Information Network
I guess he's not content with Seattle getting too much R.A.I.N., so since he can't fix it, he wants to share it with the entire country....
Appropriate name too
I think given its fate, "Icarus" would have been better.
...the telemarketers DoS'ed the site first. Bastards!
The article also says the US military seems to think Microsofts security problems were not significant enough to stop the deal.
Although I'm sure several individuals in the Middle East are wringing their hands with glee right now. One or two well-constructed worm viruses and half the Army officers could be emailing their critical documents right to them. I hope the Army saved a few bucks for a killer firewall as well....
They want all their recruits to train on the best computer simulation available to the government today.
...Watch out for trolls.
Wi-Fi is for $1000 PCs, cellular is for $100 phones.
Wi-Fi is for broadband data, cellular is for voice and, at best, low bandwidth video on tiny screens.
Wi-Fi has a short radius and an IP address, cellular towers are ubiquitous and compatible with several voice networks.
How can these be said to compete? Sure, you can do a lot of PC-ish things on your dinky cell phone, but you can't do half the things a PC on Wi-Fi can over a cellular connection. The cost-per-megabyte is only half the issue. It'll be a long time before mobile phone networks can approach the bandwidth of wireless networking, and by the time they do Wi-Fi will have leapfrogged to a whole 'nother level.
There's a lot of growth in the buck-a-minute world of cell phone downloads and uploads. People are getting innovative, too -- I've seen blogs composed mostly of photos with some short text uploaded from people's phones, and my wife uses hers as an organizer, storing names, phone numbers, addresses and alarms. As more and more phones are sync-able with people's PCs, they'll become more popular as MP3 players as well as download tools.
So this is cool, although we all know there's a plateau out there somewhere and several phone companies will crash hard when they run off the edge of it. But so what? Wi-Fi won't lose marketshare to phone makers because it can do so much more (bandwidth, public hotspots) and so much less (limited radius, hub tied to a physical landline). There's overlap, but it's less than the article implies. Until cellular phones can do everything a laptop PC can do -- and with those tiny screens and thumb-only keyboards, that's not too likely -- there's plenty of room for both.
but what's "great" is so relative and single track downloads almost creates a pop-only market.
No, the music industry gave us a pop-only market in the form of radio stations that play whatever song their paid to play. This is simply karmic retribution.
Linkin Park recently pulled its music as a singles offering from digital services.... Other acts with similar stipulations about their work include Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day
In other words, artists who have millions of CD sales already under their belt are complaining about people downloading the one or three songs they like instead of the entire album for $10-$15, because they're the ones who can afford to complain. But they certainly don't speak for the entire music industry, and I scarcely think they have a right to.
A singles-oriented model only has the possibility of hurting the bottom line of acts who already have a worldwide following in the millions of dollars. The idea is to sell songs by artists who may not be able to sell entire CDs as easily. As Neophytus said, 12 cents is certainly a step up from the status quo for any band who can't afford to renegotiate their own contracts from a position of strength.
This is listed in the manual, which you are right, is a very poorly done Korean effort. ...which leads me to wonder if Americans have some kind of patent on bad English grammar.
I dropped my subscription to NetFlix sometime last year and replaced it with GreenCine, even though they were slightly more expensive and took longer to ship to me. Why? Selection.
I liked getting anime DVDs from Netflix, but the way they kept buying only the first two or three DVDs of a six- or eight-disc series annoyed the frick out of me. I found GreenCine after a short search at Yahoo, and the site promised a greater selection of independent and anime rentals -- and they were absolutely right.
My point is, the real advantage of the online rental market should be greater selection of eclectic titles. Have you ever shopped for movies at Wal-Mart? Mainstream stuff all the way. Their CD selection is even worse. I started buying books and CDs from Amazon.com not for the prices, but because their selection was that much better, even if I lost the advantage of immediate gratification.
If people want to rent mainstream videos, then they'll always do it at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, where they're promised "guaranteed in stock" even if they only keep it for two nights. Immediacy is more important than "keep it as long as you like" in most consumers' minds; if it weren't, we wouldn't have movie channels on cable TV at all.
So kudos to Wal-Mart for entering a new arena (for them), and may NetFlix be driven to excel even more because of it. But until they both realize the real advantages of what they're doing and offer a wider and more complete selection, I'll happily ignore them both.
Apple may be marginalized, but they're the ones on the consumer end who keep building the bridges Microsoft has to walk across. No new technology coming forward? Apple built their own with the iPod. They were late to the game with iTunes, granted, but iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD are still leaps and bounds ahead of any competition in terms of ease-of-use.
The "digital hub" strategy they're embracing is working very well for Apple. The only problem, natch, is that digital camcorders (and camcorders and DVD burners) are still too expensive to be casually embraced by most consumers. But then, prices are getting lower all the time -- simple digital cameras under $100 are easy to come by, and used iPods can be found on eBay for as low as $100-$150. Apple knows that people are doing less and less with their personal computers but more and more with the other "computers" around them, and constantly works on ways to tie those peripherals to Apple's hardware and software.
What Microsoft ought to be throwing it's money towards, then, is building easy-to-use consumer software that consumers actually *want* to use, not because they're gimmicky but because they're easy to understand. Media Player is a good start. Their video editor needs much work, and integrating it with the ever-cheaper DVD burners and VideoCD writers could only help them.
Then let's try some new ideas, just to see if they take off. Skip the Tablet PC thing; build a cheap (like $50-$60) e-book reader that people can actually afford and will want to own, then get the magazine and newspaper publishers to sign on. Try to really integrate webcams and IM. A Flash-format animation creator for under $50 so people can make their own cartoons. They don't have to give this stuff away with the OS, if they make it cheap enough to buy separately. (I'm keen on that $50 price point, which is the most your average consumer will spend on non-profit-making software.)
Microsoft is, IMO, so bent on keeping the business markets that they've all but neglected their consumer market. Aside from some pretty colors, self-customizing menus and Apple-chasing software hacks, they've not done anything new for the home market since Windows 95 was released. It's good for them to spend time building tools that developers and managers want to have, but it helps their image immensely to add the stuff home users would want to have -- even if they don't make as much profit from it.
While they obviously lack the English conversion, you can also see the SL-C750 and SL-C760 at the Japenese eZaurus.com site.
For the same time period, both major pattern makers referred scores of customers to Monsterpatterns as a great source for discontinued patterns. These referrals came by way of email and telephone from Simplicity and McCall employees.
While this doesn't qualify as official company policy (employees referring customers to the site on their own, rather than the company telling the employees to refer them), I think it badly undermines the pattern companies' case. Obviously they knew about the site for a long time, they knew what it did and what it offered, and they turned a blind eye towards it.
Suddenly, some lawyer realizes it might be grounds for a quick courtroom profit and announces they're suing under (of all things) the DCMA. As if throwing boxes in the trash could possibly constitute encryption....
Six Degrees by Creo is another attempt to do this same sort of thing, except that it's commercial and it's been available for Mac OS X and Windows for several months.
Apple picked $0.99 because it's a critical price point in the minds of consumers. It's as high as you can get and be less than a dollar, and $1.00 is already considered a pittance by most consumers -- especially those used to $15 CDs.
On the average, most consumers won't differentiate between $0.89 and $0.99, any more than they'd shop at a different store to pay $11.89 instead of $11.99. Even $0.75 isn't such an improvement over $0.99 psychologically speaking -- a competitor would have to go as low as $0.50, or close to it, to take customers from Apple on price alone.
Besides, we're selling bits here, not products. "Razor-thin margins" don't actually exist with virtual merchandise. Apple's had a nationwide network for distributing media quickly for some time now -- specifically, for QuickTime movie trailers -- and *that* was for zero profits. All they can do with this store is make money.
If you argue "that's too complicated!", you probably don't want an iso image of a compile-from-source linux distro in the first place.
I thought the whole point of a LiveCD was to simplify the process in the first place? I can burn an ISO to CD using Toast 5 just fine, and don't even need a command line to do it.
This isn't the first time someone's complained about geocaching in public-owned lands. Ideally, geocaching wouldn't produce any problems -- you locate the stash, extract it, exchange one item for your own, and re-stash it -- except that the fun of geocaching comes when you have to hunt a bit. That sometimes means digging up the ground, climbing (and re-climbing) trees, or otherwise moving or stressing things that shouldn't be constantly moved or stressed.
The Petrified Forest National Park in the U.S. doesn't allow visitors to pick up bits of petrified wood off the ground, asking them to buy it from the gift shop instead, because it would eventually lead to the removal of all the small samples that make the place what it is. Imagine geocachers roaming and digging all around that place.
Sometimes, preserving natural beauty means inconveniencing the same visitors who've come to see it. I don't consider this unreasonable, since there's still thousands of acres of land, public and unowned, that geocachers can still use. They may not be as scenic to get to, that's all.
Microsoft and AOL/Time Warner are running fast to get their own online Apple-like music store up and running, now that Apple's has been the success it has been -- doubly so since Apple's planning a Windows version of iTunes and the music store by the end of the year. Microsoft could probably beat them to market with a shoddy music store without even sweating.
So Apple needs to get ahead and stay ahead. To do that, ease-of-use isn't enough (or Apple would have the 95% user share, not Microsoft) -- they need to have the biggest, most comprehensive, most searchable library of online music anywhere. Consumers won't get iTunes if Microsoft's store is already installed, but they will get it if iTunes offers three times more songs.
I think that once Apple gets a large number of indie labels in the store, the rest will eventually come on their own. That, plus a $100 iPod of any size, will be all they'll need to stay ahead of the competition for some time to come.