1. How do you decide who was "hurt"? Anyone who bought a computer with an MS OS in a given timeframe.
How much do they deserve? How much more did MS make than they should have? Would you include recompence for lost revenues to other OS producers?
2. How do you find them? You allow them to come forward to reclaim their money.
Based on the rebate or class action settlement model, that's a 50% solution at best.
3. What do you do about the dead ones? The utterly common legal process: it goes to their descendants if any.
Again, enormous holes in that process. Look at all the unclaimed money in state coffers that people already had control of.
4. How much will all of the above cost? How much does allowing crime and graft to go unremedied cost?
You didn't answer.
5. What do you tell the people who will now die of common diseases who would have been saved by that money? What do you tell the people who will die of starvation because that money got spent on diseases instead of food distribution work?
Again, no answer.
But given that implied choice, you're saving 1 of 2 groups of lives if you pick either medicine or food. You're suggesting rebates for MS users vs. saving any of those lives.
There are services that already do this for just about every level of roads - 10 or 50 ft intervals using automated cameras on vehicle dashboards. This is previously done so that traffic engineers don't have to drive to a place to see it when they need to assess traffic changes, signals, signs, etc.
How do I know this? A contestant on PRI's "Whad'Ya Know" explained to host Michael Feldman how this was his company's job. You can listen to it here: http://www.notmuch.com/Show/
Physical? A tensegrity sphere. 2', from dowels, wire and screw eyes. Just because people don't believe it when they see it. They don't believe it when they touch it, and they don't believe it when it bounces off the wall intact.
Virtual? A network of voting machines (circa 1989 like they have/had in Connecticut) in Hypercard. Because was remarkable to be done with an end-user product and 1-bit graphics on an 8 MHz machine.
OK, I'll call. To paraphrase David Kearns, no more prizes for rants, prizes only for solutions. How would you solve the problem you perceive? No time machines involved.
"companies and other entities involved in federal litigation"
Odds are you already know if you're one of these.
(Use your best Jeff Foxworthy voice for this next part)
"If your CFO has been escorted out of the building on the national news by people with big yellow letters on their backs..." "If the new guy in the office spends all his spare time chatting up his sleeve instead of the secretary..." "If your office phone system now says Press 1 for Customer Service, Press 2 for Public Defenders..." "If they show Dennis Kozlowski on Biography and your boss snorts "Huh. Pikers..." "if you check your email and a cheery voice announces "You've got bail!"
Those kids aren't using the slots in a $699 gateway. No one is. With the shipping ports these days they're about as useful as the stickers all over the front of a PC. What are you putting in those slots? Legacy ports for parallel and serial? Firewire that's Mac standard?
The Intel Mac implementation of the onboard Intel video is better than anyone predicted.
The point is, those bottom price Dells and Gateways and HPs are crippled machines. I've walked literally hundreds of people through the frustration of months (maybe a year) later having to go out and buy a real machine that can do real work. There are still Celeron processors for sale at major manufacturers. If Apple was still selling a G3 your head would have exploded writing your comment, but somehow the Celeron isn't an issue.
Apple is selling a realistic machine at a decent price. You want dirt cheap, you get what you pay for.
The article claims there's a tax on shiny aesthetics - but the reality is make a PC do what a Mac does and the price difference is negligible - so the shiny part - the difference in price after actual performace - isn't costing much at all.
Just EOL sales and support for Windows XP once the last OEM copy ships.
IIRC Windows 98 support was supposed to end in a few months from some announcement. A while later they re-announced the date for oh, "next Thursday".
I have to imagine that once they figured out that killing support for all previous versions would rip the last barnacle of Win98 from the hull of the SS Microsoft, someone in marketing did his best Daffy Duck imitation yelling "Shoot'em now! Shoot'em now!!!"
Billund is still manufacturing, but it's moving to Czech Republic, real soon now. Enfield is moving its manufacturing and packing to Mexico, that should be complete by March. They'll be hoding an internal job fair sometime this winter - if you want some creative, dedicated folks, you'll find them there.
Our FIRST team was sponsored by LEGO for several years until 1998 - we were working in their machine shop and got to see a great deal of the facility. Back around 1990 when the original LEGO TC Logo came out, we worked with them on a few projects. They're an amazing bunch, from the shop techs to the engineers to the line staff to the model team (still based in Enfield).
There are bowls of LEGO on every conference table, not just for brand vanity, but for people to toy with as they discuss and solve problems. There's even an offshoot company, LEGO Serious Play that does corporate team training based on doing things with LEGO.
One of their points of pride is that as they increased automation, they only displaced workers to other areas of the factory, they (at least back then) never tossed someone out of the site as their existing job was automated.
In 1990 the packing lines were controlled by an amazing array of personal computers, Apple II, PC, I believe we even saw a few Commodores.
They since standardized. The machines also page the engineering staff when there's an issue with one, this replaces the sound and light alarm they used to have.
They've had two sorts of molding machines - one series that let the bricks and flashing fall through to sorters, and another where arms picked up the flashing and let the bricks drop. People touring would ask why some were robots (= had arms) and others weren't!
Some of the parts are assembled on the lines, most are simply picked, sorted and packed into those perforated bags. If you notice the tiny dot on a minfig head, that's where the high-contrast optical system aligns each minifig head to the body. It's very cool to see.
We had engineer/parents from other companies who used the same molding machines and could not believe the quality LEGO was getting - I believe their quoted tolerance was 3/1000 of an inch. Look for "gates" where the plastic entered the mold, or punches where the machine tapped the brick to free it - good luck finding either - then remember what your scale model kits looked like.
First time through, we saw pallettes of boxes from Bayer. When I asked the engineers what they were getting from Germany, the answer was ABS plastic. Yes, they were shipping raw plastic over here, they're very particular - no metals allowed whatsoever. One of their engineers managed a program to get plastics from GE in Pittsfield MA 50 miles up the road to do the same thing - the savings reportedly bought them about 7 years time here in CT.
There are no heaters per se in a LEGO molding machine - the pellets are fed through increasingly smaller feed tubes by arbors, and the pressure and friction creates the heat. When they hit the molds, the plastic is about the consistency of toothpaste. They have a rogues gallery of sculptures created by leaks.
They filled a 55 gallon drum every night with the bricks that get swept off the floor - we offered to help them get rid of those, but they recycle them - I believe to a comb company.
Our second year at FIRST, the robot was approximating an arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist. The ergonomics of the standard joysticks and buttons were a real challenge. So the team built a "waldo" out of LEGO, where the operator could lay their hand into it, and the robot would respond to the movements of the hand. All was well until the judges reminded us that LEGO was not in the kit of parts of alllowables list. They did offer us the chance to take our allowance of PVC pipe and moplding LEGO bricks out of that, and building the waldo out of them. The two LEGO engineers looked like someone just suggested they use Waterford crystal to haul horse manure. We went back to joysticks.
... from my PowerBook Duo days, sleep put the machine into a 1Hz clock (yes, that's one cycle per second) for as long as the battery had left. On a full charge, that was two weeks. In ten years of PowerBook Duo, 1400, iBook G3 and iBook G4, I can count on one hand the humber of times sleep didn't wake. Maybe it's changed, but I'd expect you still have days of sleep, and if you're typically not using a laptop for days on end, you may not need a laptop...
"...lied later when he was asked by the school principle what he said to the students..."
Lying, mean teachers who produce students who can't tell a principle from a principal.
By the way, one idiot teacher in a New Jersey school hardly equates with "US Classrooms Torn Between Science and Religion", even if it's on Richard Dawkins' blog.
Wow. Hadn't thought of that. Man, would that be attractive. I'm smiling just imagining Ubuntu's ease and polish with 12 months of Google think and implement time applied to it. If they could do for a desktop what they did for mapping...
From what I can see with progressing versions of Office - much of the UI is "neato", but I have yet to see any real productivity gains or or truly innovative means to get work done than I can in - oh - Appleworks. I'm not talking as a fanboy here, but as someone who works in an education lab, and watches room after room of people who just want to get something done struggle with where that command is or what this button really does. Didn't an MS rep nearly lead MW Expo in prayer while showing how the new Office could now keep a chart on a single printed page? This is groundbreaking? We use Neo Office as well for student machines and still have a half dozen of us who pay for the current version of MS office. OO et.al. could do well to branch from the current UI canon for Office and look to do it better. I'd start with things like more keyboard equivalents for common tasks (this is a sore point with MS Office) and more thought-out menu heirarchies. You're aping a company that still thinks that pressing "start" to stop is perfectly normal. There's plenty of room for improvement.
So if - as you claim - it is demonstrably impossible to stop the trend - your answer is to do nothing? Please show all math. Going on our merry way without a defensible plan for our living quarters is how we got here. Good luck with that continued approach. We can - and have - reversed some fairly scary things on this planet. Maybe this is doable, maybe it's not. There is one certain path to failure, and that is ignorance. The populus needs to be at the very least informed and in dialogue on this or nothing will change. If the populus needs to be hit betweeen the eyes with the two-by-four like this movie - then so be it. It's taken this populus four years to figure out that going to war without a defensible plan for success was a bad idea. And all under the guidance of a president who had a long list to pick from of lessons learned about Vietnam when he visited there - and picked one that wasn't even on anyone's list.
I'm a biologist by training. Some of the physical and chemical parameters we're seeing now weren't even thought to be possible, never mind reachable with some way to go. That means one of two things - either we were wrong about what the occupants of this planet can stand, or we're well on our way past screwed heading for LOS.
There's no reasonable, practical sense in betting on the former, and if the latter is reversible, we need to know that.
As for Al Gore, he's better in this movie than you ever saw him in a debate. He's like Bob Dole in that sense - one person on a podium, another when it's more like normal dialogue.
Re:Let's cut the "more expsnsive" nonsense...
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
Scale up to 2.0ghz/80/1/combo/intel graphics/full3yr/pro os+os CD on both MacBook and dv2000t and you're at $1546 or $1548. Again, less than two bucks. (Note - there's a $150 rebate on the HP right now, but there'll be on one on the Mac in a week, etc...) If gamers want to spend another $300 to get Nvidia - god bless'em - it's not the mainstream. So you could point to any number of application-specific instances to see a particular gain in a particular platform's price:performance. Point is the average user can match a Mac +/- $100 for what a brand name PC can do most of the time. Frankenboxes nonwithstanding.
You were the one asking for OSX on your ol' T23 rather than on a current MBP.
"It's a widely held one. The style over substance design of Apple's products is a widely cited reason for people buying generic Wintel boxes and running Linux desktops on them. I'm talking about people who would rather run Mac OS X but can't stomach the hardware."
And just how big a market is that? Widely cited? Where?
"The effect that Apple's keyboards have on RSI is not "taste", it's "physical pain"."
So where's the class action suit?
I respect your opinons, I just don't see them rising to the stature of universal truths.
Let's cut the "more expsnsive" nonsense...
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
Apple MacBook 1.83 Core2Duo / 512 / 60 / Combo / 1280x800 / full battery / Pro OS = $1,099.00 HP dv2000t 1.83 Core2Duo / 512 / 60 / Combo / 1280x800 / full battery / Pro OS = $1,097.99 Woo hoo! One dollar and one penny.
Slashdot Mirror
1. How do you decide who was "hurt"?
Anyone who bought a computer with an MS OS in a given timeframe.
How much do they deserve?
How much more did MS make than they should have?
Would you include recompence for lost revenues to other OS producers?
2. How do you find them?
You allow them to come forward to reclaim their money.
Based on the rebate or class action settlement model, that's a 50% solution at best.
3. What do you do about the dead ones?
The utterly common legal process: it goes to their descendants if any.
Again, enormous holes in that process. Look at all the unclaimed money in state coffers that people already had control of.
4. How much will all of the above cost?
How much does allowing crime and graft to go unremedied cost?
You didn't answer.
5. What do you tell the people who will now die of common diseases who would have been saved by that money?
What do you tell the people who will die of starvation because that money got spent on diseases instead of food distribution work?
Again, no answer.
But given that implied choice, you're saving 1 of 2 groups of lives if you pick either medicine or food.
You're suggesting rebates for MS users vs. saving any of those lives.
There are services that already do this for just about every level of roads - 10 or 50 ft intervals using automated cameras on vehicle dashboards. This is previously done so that traffic engineers don't have to drive to a place to see it when they need to assess traffic changes, signals, signs, etc.
How do I know this? A contestant on PRI's "Whad'Ya Know" explained to host Michael Feldman how this was his company's job. You can listen to it here: http://www.notmuch.com/Show/
1. How do you decide who was "hurt"?
2. How do you find them?
3. What do you do about the dead ones?
4. How much will all of the above cost?
5. What do you tell the people who will now die of common diseases who would have been saved by that money?
Nothing's as simple as it seems.
Physical? A tensegrity sphere. 2', from dowels, wire and screw eyes. Just because people don't believe it when they see it. They don't believe it when they touch it, and they don't believe it when it bounces off the wall intact.
Virtual? A network of voting machines (circa 1989 like they have/had in Connecticut) in Hypercard. Because was remarkable to be done with an end-user product and 1-bit graphics on an 8 MHz machine.
OK, I'll call.
To paraphrase David Kearns, no more prizes for rants, prizes only for solutions.
How would you solve the problem you perceive?
No time machines involved.
"companies and other entities involved in federal litigation"
Odds are you already know if you're one of these.
(Use your best Jeff Foxworthy voice for this next part)
"If your CFO has been escorted out of the building on the national news by people with big yellow letters on their backs..."
"If the new guy in the office spends all his spare time chatting up his sleeve instead of the secretary..."
"If your office phone system now says Press 1 for Customer Service, Press 2 for Public Defenders..."
"If they show Dennis Kozlowski on Biography and your boss snorts "Huh. Pikers..."
"if you check your email and a cheery voice announces "You've got bail!"
...with its revenues of US$19B and $10B in equity, what's to wonder about? Just look up their R&D campus: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=AAPL
Those kids aren't using the slots in a $699 gateway. No one is. With the shipping ports these days they're about as useful as the stickers all over the front of a PC. What are you putting in those slots? Legacy ports for parallel and serial? Firewire that's Mac standard?
The Intel Mac implementation of the onboard Intel video is better than anyone predicted.
The point is, those bottom price Dells and Gateways and HPs are crippled machines. I've walked literally hundreds of people through the frustration of months (maybe a year) later having to go out and buy a real machine that can do real work. There are still Celeron processors for sale at major manufacturers. If Apple was still selling a G3 your head would have exploded writing your comment, but somehow the Celeron isn't an issue.
Apple is selling a realistic machine at a decent price. You want dirt cheap, you get what you pay for.
The article claims there's a tax on shiny aesthetics - but the reality is make a PC do what a Mac does and the price difference is negligible - so the shiny part - the difference in price after actual performace - isn't costing much at all.
"It seems the young guns don't have the extra cash to stump up for smooth shiny aesthetics."
How do you conclude that? Feature match a Gateway laptop to a MacBook 2.0 and you've got an $11 difference. iMac? $45 bucks.
A tag line on the other side of the see-saw could be "Apple doesn't make the stripped machines that these kids will settle for."
Just EOL sales and support for Windows XP once the last OEM copy ships.
IIRC Windows 98 support was supposed to end in a few months from some announcement. A while later they re-announced the date for oh, "next Thursday".
I have to imagine that once they figured out that killing support for all previous versions would rip the last barnacle of Win98 from the hull of the SS Microsoft, someone in marketing did his best Daffy Duck imitation yelling "Shoot'em now! Shoot'em now!!!"
When my father used to yell, we'd come off the sofa a couple of feet.
... is such that if this thing had augured-in the headlines would still read "Jetliner Crashes. No Survivors."
Billund is still manufacturing, but it's moving to Czech Republic, real soon now.
Enfield is moving its manufacturing and packing to Mexico, that should be complete by March.
They'll be hoding an internal job fair sometime this winter - if you want some creative, dedicated folks, you'll find them there.
Our FIRST team was sponsored by LEGO for several years until 1998 - we were working in their machine shop and got to see a great deal of the facility.
Back around 1990 when the original LEGO TC Logo came out, we worked with them on a few projects.
They're an amazing bunch, from the shop techs to the engineers to the line staff to the model team (still based in Enfield).
There are bowls of LEGO on every conference table, not just for brand vanity, but for people to toy with as they discuss and solve problems. There's even an offshoot company, LEGO Serious Play that does corporate team training based on doing things with LEGO.
One of their points of pride is that as they increased automation, they only displaced workers to other areas of the factory, they (at least back then) never tossed someone out of the site as their existing job was automated.
In 1990 the packing lines were controlled by an amazing array of personal computers, Apple II, PC, I believe we even saw a few Commodores.
They since standardized. The machines also page the engineering staff when there's an issue with one, this replaces the sound and light alarm they used to have.
They've had two sorts of molding machines - one series that let the bricks and flashing fall through to sorters, and another where arms picked up the flashing and let the bricks drop. People touring would ask why some were robots (= had arms) and others weren't!
Some of the parts are assembled on the lines, most are simply picked, sorted and packed into those perforated bags. If you notice the tiny dot on a minfig head, that's where the high-contrast optical system aligns each minifig head to the body. It's very cool to see.
We had engineer/parents from other companies who used the same molding machines and could not believe the quality LEGO was getting - I believe their quoted tolerance was 3/1000 of an inch. Look for "gates" where the plastic entered the mold, or punches where the machine tapped the brick to free it - good luck finding either - then remember what your scale model kits looked like.
First time through, we saw pallettes of boxes from Bayer. When I asked the engineers what they were getting from Germany, the answer was ABS plastic. Yes, they were shipping raw plastic over here, they're very particular - no metals allowed whatsoever. One of their engineers managed a program to get plastics from GE in Pittsfield MA 50 miles up the road to do the same thing - the savings reportedly bought them about 7 years time here in CT.
There are no heaters per se in a LEGO molding machine - the pellets are fed through increasingly smaller feed tubes by arbors, and the pressure and friction creates the heat. When they hit the molds, the plastic is about the consistency of toothpaste. They have a rogues gallery of sculptures created by leaks.
They filled a 55 gallon drum every night with the bricks that get swept off the floor - we offered to help them get rid of those, but they recycle them - I believe to a comb company.
Our second year at FIRST, the robot was approximating an arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist. The ergonomics of the standard joysticks and buttons were a real challenge. So the team built a "waldo" out of LEGO, where the operator could lay their hand into it, and the robot would respond to the movements of the hand. All was well until the judges reminded us that LEGO was not in the kit of parts of alllowables list. They did offer us the chance to take our allowance of PVC pipe and moplding LEGO bricks out of that, and building the waldo out of them. The two LEGO engineers looked like someone just suggested they use Waterford crystal to haul horse manure. We went back to joysticks.
... from my PowerBook Duo days, sleep put the machine into a 1Hz clock (yes, that's one cycle per second) for as long as the battery had left. On a full charge, that was two weeks. In ten years of PowerBook Duo, 1400, iBook G3 and iBook G4, I can count on one hand the humber of times sleep didn't wake. Maybe it's changed, but I'd expect you still have days of sleep, and if you're typically not using a laptop for days on end, you may not need a laptop...
You have to choose "Start" in order to initiate any of the "Stop" thingies.
Then you choose "Turn Off Computer" to choose one of the "I Probably Don't Really Want To Turn It Off" thingies.
And it took 24 people to come up with this.
"Barlows? We ain't got no Barlows. We don't need no Barlows. I don't have to show you any stinking Barlows."
Damn. Here I've been using the regular-sized ones all this time...
"...lied later when he was asked by the school principle what he said to the students..."
Lying, mean teachers who produce students who can't tell a principle from a principal.
By the way, one idiot teacher in a New Jersey school hardly equates with "US Classrooms Torn Between Science and Religion", even if it's on Richard Dawkins' blog.
Wow. Hadn't thought of that. Man, would that be attractive. I'm smiling just imagining Ubuntu's ease and polish with 12 months of Google think and implement time applied to it. If they could do for a desktop what they did for mapping...
From what I can see with progressing versions of Office - much of the UI is "neato", but I have yet to see any real productivity gains or or truly innovative means to get work done than I can in - oh - Appleworks. I'm not talking as a fanboy here, but as someone who works in an education lab, and watches room after room of people who just want to get something done struggle with where that command is or what this button really does. Didn't an MS rep nearly lead MW Expo in prayer while showing how the new Office could now keep a chart on a single printed page? This is groundbreaking?
We use Neo Office as well for student machines and still have a half dozen of us who pay for the current version of MS office. OO et.al. could do well to branch from the current UI canon for Office and look to do it better. I'd start with things like more keyboard equivalents for common tasks (this is a sore point with MS Office) and more thought-out menu heirarchies.
You're aping a company that still thinks that pressing "start" to stop is perfectly normal. There's plenty of room for improvement.
So if - as you claim - it is demonstrably impossible to stop the trend - your answer is to do nothing?
Please show all math.
Going on our merry way without a defensible plan for our living quarters is how we got here.
Good luck with that continued approach.
We can - and have - reversed some fairly scary things on this planet.
Maybe this is doable, maybe it's not. There is one certain path to failure, and that is ignorance.
The populus needs to be at the very least informed and in dialogue on this or nothing will change.
If the populus needs to be hit betweeen the eyes with the two-by-four like this movie - then so be it.
It's taken this populus four years to figure out that going to war without a defensible plan for success was a bad idea.
And all under the guidance of a president who had a long list to pick from of lessons learned about Vietnam when he visited there - and picked one that wasn't even on anyone's list.
I'm a biologist by training.
Some of the physical and chemical parameters we're seeing now weren't even thought to be possible, never mind reachable with some way to go.
That means one of two things - either we were wrong about what the occupants of this planet can stand, or we're well on our way past screwed heading for LOS.
There's no reasonable, practical sense in betting on the former, and if the latter is reversible, we need to know that.
As for Al Gore, he's better in this movie than you ever saw him in a debate. He's like Bob Dole in that sense - one person on a podium, another when it's more like normal dialogue.
Scale up to 2.0ghz/80/1/combo/intel graphics/full3yr/pro os+os CD
on both MacBook and dv2000t
and you're at $1546 or $1548.
Again, less than two bucks.
(Note - there's a $150 rebate on the HP right now, but there'll be on one on the Mac in a week, etc...)
If gamers want to spend another $300 to get Nvidia - god bless'em - it's not the mainstream. So you could point to any number of application-specific instances to see a particular gain in a particular platform's price:performance.
Point is the average user can match a Mac +/- $100 for what a brand name PC can do most of the time.
Frankenboxes nonwithstanding.
You were the one asking for OSX on your ol' T23 rather than on a current MBP.
"It's a widely held one. The style over substance design of Apple's products is a widely cited reason for people buying generic Wintel boxes and running Linux desktops on them. I'm talking about people who would rather run Mac OS X but can't stomach the hardware."
And just how big a market is that? Widely cited? Where?
"The effect that Apple's keyboards have on RSI is not "taste", it's "physical pain"."
So where's the class action suit?
I respect your opinons, I just don't see them rising to the stature of universal truths.
Apple MacBook 1.83 Core2Duo / 512 / 60 / Combo / 1280x800 / full battery / Pro OS = $1,099.00
HP dv2000t 1.83 Core2Duo / 512 / 60 / Combo / 1280x800 / full battery / Pro OS = $1,097.99
Woo hoo! One dollar and one penny.
.. he should go to jail, and it was bad thing to do.
But what a monstrously cool - um - "solution".