The app store concept is not evil unless traditional distribution is eliminated.
I think it would be very easy for MS to have its cake and eat it too. MS does not need to lock out alternatives because others will do it for them!
MS could make the app store a new choice that expands the distribution of software. Unlike Apple's "i" products, this time the app store would be in addition to traditional distribution, not a replacement. Of course, the apps in the store have undergone some review from a virus/spyware/malware point of view, whereas traditional distribution is what it is. With the app store's new level of safety, users in general (and corporate users in particular) would quickly self-mandate the exclusive use of the app store. Corporate IT would hop on the bandwagon in 5 seconds if it had everything they needed. MS would market this as their best solution to the virus/spyware/malware problem "and of course, it's completely voluntary."
Using a convenient control panel setting, the users (or their helpful sysadmins) could make a unilateral decision to restrict installation of software to the app store. For MS, it's a win across the board: No DOJ investigation, more open than Apple, and for once MS has a way to do something useful about unstable and rogue programs that seem to slip past Windows' limited defenses.
... to include an external antenna connector and let the third party market offer a wide variety of antennas?
If people want to use the internal antenna and get the radio performance that goes along with it, fine. But there are many people who would cheerfully put up with a clip-on antenna to get coverage in fringe areas.
IMHO, antennas have been a long-neglected component of cell phones. When people try to use a phone whose antenna is not only inside the car but also inside the phone, I am surprised it works at all.
From my days in ham radio, I remember it was difficult to use a UHF hand-held in the car -- unless the stub antenna was replaced with a cable to an external (outside the car) antenna. Then it worked well.
My first mobile phone was on the old analog system (AMPS). The phone was permanently installed in the car, with the antenna mounted in a hole that was drilled in the trunk. Although the service was pricey, it was far more reliable than today's hand-helds on digital cellular networks. Although some of the performance came from having 30x the transmit power of a hand-held, the system was equally solid on transmit and receive.
When I "upgraded" to a hand-held, I found myself unable to make a call in the same places where the old AMPS system worked flawlessly. As an experiment, I tried using a Bluetooth headset. I opened the car sunroof and held the phone above the roof while talking on the headset. It worked great, but not recommended while driving! Having a passenger hold the phone solves the safety problem, although rain remains a challenge.
My current car has a cell phone Bluetooth package that includes built-in microphones and utilizes the car's audio system. The location of the phone inside the car determines its performance. On the dashboard, it's very good. Sitting in my pocket, not so much.
Back to the iPhone: As much as Apple is famous for their clean designs, they are equally famous for underestimating design challenges that should be met head-on rather than finessed. There is simply no place inside the phone where you can put an antenna without the possibility of the user's body blocking the signal.
Although I understand the historical reasons why IT was frequently placed under finance, the world has changed. In ancient times, IT was centralized and capital-intensive. I worked in a state agency that had about $3 million worth of mainframe hardware in a big room. The users had terminals. I was spending between $500,000 and $1,000,000 on capital expense per year. Salaries in IT were rather high as well; even an entry-level programmer was well-paid compared to the rest of the organization. Since the goal of IT was to promote efficiency, you needed the involvement of finance to make sure that the cost of IT was justified.
In the modern world, IT is decentralized. If you think about the cost per employee, capital expense is a fraction of what once was. Half of the IT employees make less than an executive secretary. Although the official goal of IT is still to promote efficiency, the reality is that most projects are mandated by some type of policy compliance or to keep pace with competitors. Not much of this is truly discretionary. The linkage of IT to finance has (in my opinion) outlived its usefulness. I have seen too many dumb ideas leak from finance into IT.
As crazy as it seems, you might be right. Notice that your solution re-images the machine, so that hard drive anomalies would be taken care of as well. I have had bizarre hardware problems with disk I/O (a flawed cable in one case that was really tough to diagnose). This led to corrupt files, as well as the occasional RAM issue. Bad RAM can easily lead to corrupted files if the bad bytes in memory are written faithfully to the disk.
Another possibility is running the wrong version JRE for the applet. Some applets are VERY picky. I have seen situations where newer versions were not always backwards compatible.
Very large companies need to have a disaster recovery plan in place, and contacts to call when downtime is costing money. Especially outsourcing or service providers.
So far, so good.
If you run linux in this environment, "my team knows linux" is not going to cut it.
"My team knows Windows" is not going to cut it either.
You want to be able to place the blame on the "vendor" as opposed to being responsible yourself.
Wrong. You need to solve the problem. If you trust the vendors more than you trust yourself, go directly to fail. Even under ideal circumstances the "blame the vendor" excuse only works for about 15 seconds. Your employer does not view the vendor as the "last line of defense" -- you are. In the event of catastrophic meltdown, the vendor will probably survive (regardless of fault). Will you?
So you don't modify the code, and you buy the support package.
I wouldn't go rolling my own version of OpenOffice (or anything else). Fortunately, there is seldom any need to do this (on any platform). As for support, it's like prescription medication. If the doctor writes a prescription and the pharmacy gives you pills, maybe everything is fine. But not every health problem can be solved this way, nor is every IT issue resolved by vendor support. What happens then?
Red Hat should be very profitable, given that, except Microsoft makes sweetheart deals with the big companies to keep them using microsoft tools. I have a full MSDN subscription, which would cost me piles of money but most likely costs my employer very little per head. I can download and use and develop with anything I want, for free. It only costs money because the production servers have to be fully licensed and legit.
Microsoft is everywhere, so they can afford to give away freebies, charge for just the production installs, and still make boatloads of cash. If you take a look at the revenue compared to actual software usage, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Microsoft is giving away as much or more software than Red Hat. Direct end-user sales are just the icing on the cake - someone paying full price for Windows is very rare, it's usually OEM cost, which is approximately 10% of the cost.
MS does a nifty job of shifting the cost to the end user desktop (CALs and MS Office), along with the server side (MSSQL, etc.) Agreed, the cost of MSDN is not all that much, but the maintenance on everything really adds up. Red Hat can easily undercut MS on price, as they have so many products that are created at no cost to them. MSDN freebies aside, the average Windows PC has about $500-$1000 of software on board: Windows, Office, CALs (Exchange, MSSQL, Windows itself). There is SOME money to be saved on open source licensing, but the real savings are elsewhere...
So Red Hat's numbers are probably not far off Microsoft's numbers, it's just reported as software sales vs. support costs. And even that difference is a technicality - Microsoft still charges for support depending on what you need and where you got the software.
Fundamentally, it's the same business model. Give lots of software away and make up for the sales losses with support charges - but with OEMs in the middle it's not transparent to the end users. Only the businesses see how the model truly works.
To me, the final frontier is support [labor] cost. By that I don't mean the MS or Red Hat call center, but the local staff who take care of everyday operations. In many companies, an army of help desk technicians fights the daily fight with classic PC problems: user error, virus, spyware, Outlook, or (worst of all) helping users deal with the limitations imposed by the local IT department. I have worked in companies where an army of MCSEs is ready to pounce on every helpdesk ticket -- and yet downtime is a major issue on the server
...on how confident we feel in the reliability of communications between the ground-based pilot and the aircraft in the sky. Theoretically, nothing stops ATC from controlling these aircraft like any other, as long as there is a human pilot somewhere who can be told what to do. Use the aircraft itself as a radio relay between ground-based pilot and ATC.
Modern fly-by-wire is essentially a remote control system anyway. All we are talking about is a wireless control link, along with video and flight data -- a full scale flight simulator (without the simulator).
The new risk is mostly loss of communications (possibly via DOS attack). Without a human pilot on board, terrorists might use rogue transmitters to disrupt communications. Can't wait until the MBAs determine that costs can be reduced by outsourcing remote pilot work to India. I can hardly wait to see the Youtube videos of ATC dealing with an Indian call center!
Thinking to the logical conclusion, things get really exciting when the unmanned aircraft are truly unpiloted. They might simply have a pre-programmed GPS route to follow, all the way down to entering the airport traffic pattern and an automatic instrument landing. ATC would need some way to redirect troublesome flights; essentially reprogramming them on the fly. Hacker attacks would be disastrous.
Have you ever visited China? I have. Sometimes there is a difference between what you read on the web and what you see on the ground.
No matter how much the Chinese are investing in clean energy, the fact is they are CURRENTLY world leaders in the production of "dirty" energy. Remember - this is the same country that had to shut down its power stations so it could host the Olympic games. And since the basis of their economic growth is low cost production, don't expect any major conversion to clean energy until it makes economic sense for them.
The most sensible thing for China to do is TALK about the need to reduce carbon emissions, while offloading the burden to other nations. With any luck, the developed nations will tax their industries to the point where China takes over their production.
If you think that "cap and tax" is inevitable (whether or not you believe in global warming) then the LAST nation to adopt it will get the greatest economic benefit. That is what China will do. The FIRST nation to adopt "cap and tax" redistributes its industry to other countries, which explains why the Obama administration is pushing for it.
Considering that unilateral taxation will do nothing other than shift production to India and China, cap and tax IS THE SAME THING AS DOING NOTHING.
But maybe doing nothing is OK. The research is a mixed bag anyway, as demonstrated by the intercepted e-mail, the Himalayan debacle, the bogus Siberian temperature data, the hockey stick fiasco, etc. Grant-funded scientists will find what they are paid to find. Get the wrong results, and the money goes away. They could still be right, but the outcome of the research was determined when the funding was established. Money rules both sides of the climate debate. There are no disinterested third parties who might offer an unbiased opinion.
Notice how the low-cost methods of reducing CO2 get zero attention. BECAUSE IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY GRAB.
So why doesn't the National Academy of Science make China their top priority? Not only is China the largest emitter of CO2, it is also the fastest growing. Not much can be done with the fully-developed countries like the US, Canada, and Japan. "Cap and trade" is really just a variant of "tax and spend", which inevitably leads to "inflate and borrow".
If this is the best these people can do, their budget should be slashed. Whoever puts out this crap is wasting my tax dollars. Let's just downsize 'em and call it our national contribution to reduce global warming.
Investigate the National Academy of Science and you will find one of those "think tank" organizations that is funded by the government in order to write white papers consisting of what the government wants to hear.
Hmmm... an organization that gets 85% of its funding from the government is advising the socialist government to enact whopping taxation. Oh my, what a surprise!
Your sarcasm is especially off-target when you face the fact that nobody in this thread has suggested that eliminating foolish users would improve the Internet. Although spam and DRM could be curtailed with smarter users, I attribute these scourges to the price of freedom.
On the other hand, an "ignore this user even when posting as AC" feature would be handy indeed.
Although I had not given it much thought until now, thanks for taking the time to point out the upside of an idiot-free internet.
Like spam, the solution to DRM is to eliminate the demand. All the laws in the world can't sell a product that people are determined not to buy (except health insurance).
If you respond to spam, you are motivating the spam industry to keep up the good work. If you buy DRM, you are accepting a substandard product and encouraging the copyright industry to offer you even more restrictions in the future. Only by eliminating the demand for crap can we eliminate the supply. The Chinese have this figured out.
If the goal is to sell more devices, then a non-DRM strategy should work even better in a market where they face a dominating opponent. Apple not only has a dominant position with the devices, they are selling music DRM-free through iTunes.
How did Nokia expect to sell more devices or more music by offering an inferior product? What MBA genius thought DRM would help them compete in the US vs. a non-DRM competitor who already has commanding market share?
Piracy is readily accepted as a fact of life in China. Just about anything that is sold on CD or DVD media is available in pirate form. Small pirate vendors outnumber legitimate stores by a wide margin. It's actually harder to buy legitimate media than the pirated stuff.
Knowing this, Nokia anticipates total rejection of DRM by Chinese consumers. Using DRM to compete with pirates is business suicide. So they don't do it.
For whatever reason, Nokia thinks they can get away with DRM in other countries. Because consumers are stupid. If they don't need DRM in the world capital of piracy, why do they need it anywhere else?
How dumb are western consumers? Spam exists because a tiny percentage of morons are still opening the messages and buying herbal Viagra. DRM exists because a tiny percentage of morons is willing to by crippled products.
The copyright industry has made it clear: Only by adopting piracy on the scale of China will DRM will go away.
A truly open XML-based file format would result in a level playing field. Without the shell game of Office file formats, businesses would be quick to dump MS Office and pocket the savings. So instead, MS can play "delay and deny" in an action to thwart open document long enough for people to forget about it. Look at the great job they did screwing up IMAP in Outlook, long enough for them to push their own proprietary IMAP-style technology in Exchange.
MS is the Verizon of software. Features that don't fit the business model are to be crippled in such a way that nobody wants them.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
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" Closed architecture brings negative value."
No it doesn't. IN fact, it adds value. The PC is a mess of Virus, mal-ware, crap that doesn't run right, consumers needing the guess if their PC can actually run something.
I don't have these problems on OS X or Linux. You can fire Microsoft without resorting to closed architecture.
Those disadvantages mostly go a way with a closed system.
No matter who the "gatekeeper" is, they will abuse their power to thwart useful applications that somehow challenge the gatekeeper's business model. Verizon crippled phones and Apple's block of iPhone Skype are two prime examples. Closed architecture value add? Nonsense!
So both have their pro's and cons. For most consumers having an appliance(aka closed system) is better.
Call me crazy, but I'm not buying closed architecture. I am the customer and the customer is always right.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
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Security through obscurity has never worked for MS, nor was it effective for the DVD industry. Or the gaming industry. Or the music industry.
Security is obtained by using strong encryption algorithms that are routinely analyzed and whose weaknesses are published. If your system cannot be analyzed by the good guys, the only people doing security analysis will be the bad guys.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
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The difference is that the Xbox was sold as an upgrade to pre-existing cartridge game systems. It didn't need to act like a PC. All it had to do was improve upon legacy video consoles, and play the occasional DVD. Notice how the Xbox was priced far below a PC because of the limited mission.
If you view the iPad as a colossal ipod touch, the closed architecture is not so bad. After all, the world adopted the ipod while accepting its closed architecture. But if that's your point of view, then the "ceiling" for the ipad falls far short of what competitors will be doing with netbooks in the near future. Apple went out of their way to lock down the device.
The iPad sells for less than a MacBook, but it needs to be A LOT less. Closed architecture brings negative value. I expect a hefty discount to accept these limitations. My suggestions: Add a camera, make it run OS X, and charge whatever the market will bear.
Apple's darkest days were when they used closed architecture to ensure that Apple was the sole provider of peripherals and (to a lesser extent) software. You couldn't buy a freakin' mouse without going back to Apple. Today, Apple has superb technology that can beat Microsoft (and even Linux) on the desktop. If Apple becomes arrogant and complacent, MS will close the gap, just as they did with the original Macintosh.
An incentive for more state to join the non-nuclear club is going to start a war?
Iran was a former member of the non-nuclear club. Now they are not. That train has already left the station. While Iran plays rope-a-dope with Obama, they finish deploying their nukes. The Israelis will not sit there and wait for Ahmadinejad to follow up on his famous "wiped off the map" policy.
By failing to take a tough stand vs. Iran, Obama leaves the dirty work to the Israelis. Regardless of whether the attack is fully successful, expect a new round of retaliation and conflict. Weakness brings out the worst in rivals around the world: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, China, Russia, etc.
When Israel attacks Iran, the middle east will get out of hand. Obama will be forced into yet another war at a strategic disadvantage. With US forces spread out over Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and possibly elsewhere, China invades Taiwan, North Korea re-invades South Korea, and Iran takes a chunk of Iraq. Syria tries (and probably fails) to take back some of the land lost to Israel in prior wars. Nobody at the Pentagon ever planned to fight on five or six fronts at the same time. Obama's presidency is like having a newbie substitute teacher in charge of a class of juvenile delinquents.
So to answer your question: Yes. An incentive for one more state to [re]join the non-nuclear club is part of a Carter-esque pattern of weakness that will trigger a long list of unintended consequences.
I agree, porting an Exchange database to gmail would indeed be difficult.
But starting a NEW installation is much easier if you just go with Google right out of the box. E-mail, contacts, calendars -- all synchronized across PC, Mac, and smartphones. No Exchange required. No BES for your Blackberry.
MS really does have a tremendous support system for Exchange, as does Blackberry for BES. Problem is they both need it.
I think the REAL reason why the cash customers are gouged has little to do with collections. It's the 75%+ discounts that the insurance industry and the government require. They keep the beds full, with the system running near capacity, but only because of huge discounts. After all the paperwork and nonsense, the providers are probably running at a loss because of the discounts -- but a manageable loss AND the capacity is predictable. That leaves cash customers to pick up the rest. Meanwhile, the insurance industry and government LOVE this arrangement, because cash customers are severely punished and dragged back to the captivity of insurance and government dependence.
If cash customers could pay the same heavily-discounted rates as the insurance industry and the government, the collections problem would be greatly reduced. And with medical expenses paid directly "out of pocket", patients would shop more diligently on price and try harder to avoid seeking unnecessary treatment. Notice how the problem of uncollectible accounts is never subsidized by the insurers or the government, presumably because they are not part of the collections problem. If I offer to pay on the spot, I am not part of the collections problem either. Why should I subsidize the uncollectible accounts or (even worse) the wildly expensive "claims management" process? By offering cash on the spot, I should pay a rate LOWER THAN INSURERS, GOVERNMENT, OR TRADITIONAL CUSTOMERS. Notice how it doesn't work that way, thanks to insurers and their allies in government. Notice how the proposed healthcare reform leaves the problem intact.
"Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?"
Jones: "Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
Score one for the Daily Mail. In other words, "I desperately tried to cherry-pick some better numbers by manipulating the cutoff date, but even that failed. But it almost worked."
And later,
"How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?"
Jones: "I'm 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity."
In other words, "I stand by the conclusions that my funding depends upon, no matter how thoroughly discredited the research becomes, no matter how much data I fail to produce, or how many FOI requests I have to ignore. Dude, it's all about the funding!"
My employer has one of those "Enterprise class" IT departments. I use the phrase in quotes, because if Captain Kirk had this type of IT support on the Enterprise, Star Trek TNG would be entirely in Klingon. My wife and kids have better, more reliable networks and PC applications -- running from my HOME. At work, we suffer along with an Exchange server that takes a day off every so often. File servers are a hit-or-miss proposition. We have measurable packet loss on our own LAN! Websense blocks us from legitimate business sites. Meanwhile, the computers are locked down in such a way that half the time the automatic updates to corporate-supplied software die for lack of privileges -- but spyware plays right through.
When corporate IT simplifies its approach and cuts the MS-inspired complexity, they will discover the appeal of Macs. But not until. If Apple were to try and make the Mac as "administrator-friendly" as a PC, it would be no better than a PC. It is not easy to justify premium pricing if your product suffers from the same disease as lowball competitors.
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The app store concept is not evil unless traditional distribution is eliminated.
I think it would be very easy for MS to have its cake and eat it too. MS does not need to lock out alternatives because others will do it for them!
MS could make the app store a new choice that expands the distribution of software. Unlike Apple's "i" products, this time the app store would be in addition to traditional distribution, not a replacement. Of course, the apps in the store have undergone some review from a virus/spyware/malware point of view, whereas traditional distribution is what it is. With the app store's new level of safety, users in general (and corporate users in particular) would quickly self-mandate the exclusive use of the app store. Corporate IT would hop on the bandwagon in 5 seconds if it had everything they needed. MS would market this as their best solution to the virus/spyware/malware problem "and of course, it's completely voluntary."
Using a convenient control panel setting, the users (or their helpful sysadmins) could make a unilateral decision to restrict installation of software to the app store. For MS, it's a win across the board: No DOJ investigation, more open than Apple, and for once MS has a way to do something useful about unstable and rogue programs that seem to slip past Windows' limited defenses.
... to include an external antenna connector and let the third party market offer a wide variety of antennas?
If people want to use the internal antenna and get the radio performance that goes along with it, fine. But there are many people who would cheerfully put up with a clip-on antenna to get coverage in fringe areas.
IMHO, antennas have been a long-neglected component of cell phones. When people try to use a phone whose antenna is not only inside the car but also inside the phone, I am surprised it works at all.
From my days in ham radio, I remember it was difficult to use a UHF hand-held in the car -- unless the stub antenna was replaced with a cable to an external (outside the car) antenna. Then it worked well.
My first mobile phone was on the old analog system (AMPS). The phone was permanently installed in the car, with the antenna mounted in a hole that was drilled in the trunk. Although the service was pricey, it was far more reliable than today's hand-helds on digital cellular networks. Although some of the performance came from having 30x the transmit power of a hand-held, the system was equally solid on transmit and receive.
When I "upgraded" to a hand-held, I found myself unable to make a call in the same places where the old AMPS system worked flawlessly. As an experiment, I tried using a Bluetooth headset. I opened the car sunroof and held the phone above the roof while talking on the headset. It worked great, but not recommended while driving! Having a passenger hold the phone solves the safety problem, although rain remains a challenge.
My current car has a cell phone Bluetooth package that includes built-in microphones and utilizes the car's audio system. The location of the phone inside the car determines its performance. On the dashboard, it's very good. Sitting in my pocket, not so much.
Back to the iPhone: As much as Apple is famous for their clean designs, they are equally famous for underestimating design challenges that should be met head-on rather than finessed. There is simply no place inside the phone where you can put an antenna without the possibility of the user's body blocking the signal.
President Obama's approval rating drops to a record low of 0%. Film at eleven.
Although I understand the historical reasons why IT was frequently placed under finance, the world has changed. In ancient times, IT was centralized and capital-intensive. I worked in a state agency that had about $3 million worth of mainframe hardware in a big room. The users had terminals. I was spending between $500,000 and $1,000,000 on capital expense per year. Salaries in IT were rather high as well; even an entry-level programmer was well-paid compared to the rest of the organization. Since the goal of IT was to promote efficiency, you needed the involvement of finance to make sure that the cost of IT was justified.
In the modern world, IT is decentralized. If you think about the cost per employee, capital expense is a fraction of what once was. Half of the IT employees make less than an executive secretary. Although the official goal of IT is still to promote efficiency, the reality is that most projects are mandated by some type of policy compliance or to keep pace with competitors. Not much of this is truly discretionary. The linkage of IT to finance has (in my opinion) outlived its usefulness. I have seen too many dumb ideas leak from finance into IT.
As crazy as it seems, you might be right. Notice that your solution re-images the machine, so that hard drive anomalies would be taken care of as well. I have had bizarre hardware problems with disk I/O (a flawed cable in one case that was really tough to diagnose). This led to corrupt files, as well as the occasional RAM issue. Bad RAM can easily lead to corrupted files if the bad bytes in memory are written faithfully to the disk.
Another possibility is running the wrong version JRE for the applet. Some applets are VERY picky. I have seen situations where newer versions were not always backwards compatible.
Very large companies need to have a disaster recovery plan in place, and contacts to call when downtime is costing money. Especially outsourcing or service providers.
So far, so good.
If you run linux in this environment, "my team knows linux" is not going to cut it.
"My team knows Windows" is not going to cut it either.
You want to be able to place the blame on the "vendor" as opposed to being responsible yourself.
Wrong. You need to solve the problem. If you trust the vendors more than you trust yourself, go directly to fail. Even under ideal circumstances the "blame the vendor" excuse only works for about 15 seconds. Your employer does not view the vendor as the "last line of defense" -- you are. In the event of catastrophic meltdown, the vendor will probably survive (regardless of fault). Will you?
So you don't modify the code, and you buy the support package.
I wouldn't go rolling my own version of OpenOffice (or anything else). Fortunately, there is seldom any need to do this (on any platform). As for support, it's like prescription medication. If the doctor writes a prescription and the pharmacy gives you pills, maybe everything is fine. But not every health problem can be solved this way, nor is every IT issue resolved by vendor support. What happens then?
Red Hat should be very profitable, given that, except Microsoft makes sweetheart deals with the big companies to keep them using microsoft tools. I have a full MSDN subscription, which would cost me piles of money but most likely costs my employer very little per head. I can download and use and develop with anything I want, for free. It only costs money because the production servers have to be fully licensed and legit.
Microsoft is everywhere, so they can afford to give away freebies, charge for just the production installs, and still make boatloads of cash. If you take a look at the revenue compared to actual software usage, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Microsoft is giving away as much or more software than Red Hat. Direct end-user sales are just the icing on the cake - someone paying full price for Windows is very rare, it's usually OEM cost, which is approximately 10% of the cost.
MS does a nifty job of shifting the cost to the end user desktop (CALs and MS Office), along with the server side (MSSQL, etc.) Agreed, the cost of MSDN is not all that much, but the maintenance on everything really adds up. Red Hat can easily undercut MS on price, as they have so many products that are created at no cost to them. MSDN freebies aside, the average Windows PC has about $500-$1000 of software on board: Windows, Office, CALs (Exchange, MSSQL, Windows itself). There is SOME money to be saved on open source licensing, but the real savings are elsewhere...
So Red Hat's numbers are probably not far off Microsoft's numbers, it's just reported as software sales vs. support costs. And even that difference is a technicality - Microsoft still charges for support depending on what you need and where you got the software.
Fundamentally, it's the same business model. Give lots of software away and make up for the sales losses with support charges - but with OEMs in the middle it's not transparent to the end users. Only the businesses see how the model truly works.
To me, the final frontier is support [labor] cost. By that I don't mean the MS or Red Hat call center, but the local staff who take care of everyday operations. In many companies, an army of help desk technicians fights the daily fight with classic PC problems: user error, virus, spyware, Outlook, or (worst of all) helping users deal with the limitations imposed by the local IT department. I have worked in companies where an army of MCSEs is ready to pounce on every helpdesk ticket -- and yet downtime is a major issue on the server
An F-16 with laser-guided bombs would be highly effective AND set a great example.
...on how confident we feel in the reliability of communications between the ground-based pilot and the aircraft in the sky. Theoretically, nothing stops ATC from controlling these aircraft like any other, as long as there is a human pilot somewhere who can be told what to do. Use the aircraft itself as a radio relay between ground-based pilot and ATC.
Modern fly-by-wire is essentially a remote control system anyway. All we are talking about is a wireless control link, along with video and flight data -- a full scale flight simulator (without the simulator).
The new risk is mostly loss of communications (possibly via DOS attack). Without a human pilot on board, terrorists might use rogue transmitters to disrupt communications. Can't wait until the MBAs determine that costs can be reduced by outsourcing remote pilot work to India. I can hardly wait to see the Youtube videos of ATC dealing with an Indian call center!
Thinking to the logical conclusion, things get really exciting when the unmanned aircraft are truly unpiloted. They might simply have a pre-programmed GPS route to follow, all the way down to entering the airport traffic pattern and an automatic instrument landing. ATC would need some way to redirect troublesome flights; essentially reprogramming them on the fly. Hacker attacks would be disastrous.
Have you ever visited China? I have. Sometimes there is a difference between what you read on the web and what you see on the ground.
No matter how much the Chinese are investing in clean energy, the fact is they are CURRENTLY world leaders in the production of "dirty" energy. Remember - this is the same country that had to shut down its power stations so it could host the Olympic games. And since the basis of their economic growth is low cost production, don't expect any major conversion to clean energy until it makes economic sense for them.
The most sensible thing for China to do is TALK about the need to reduce carbon emissions, while offloading the burden to other nations. With any luck, the developed nations will tax their industries to the point where China takes over their production.
If you think that "cap and tax" is inevitable (whether or not you believe in global warming) then the LAST nation to adopt it will get the greatest economic benefit. That is what China will do. The FIRST nation to adopt "cap and tax" redistributes its industry to other countries, which explains why the Obama administration is pushing for it.
Considering that unilateral taxation will do nothing other than shift production to India and China, cap and tax IS THE SAME THING AS DOING NOTHING.
But maybe doing nothing is OK. The research is a mixed bag anyway, as demonstrated by the intercepted e-mail, the Himalayan debacle, the bogus Siberian temperature data, the hockey stick fiasco, etc. Grant-funded scientists will find what they are paid to find. Get the wrong results, and the money goes away. They could still be right, but the outcome of the research was determined when the funding was established. Money rules both sides of the climate debate. There are no disinterested third parties who might offer an unbiased opinion.
Notice how the low-cost methods of reducing CO2 get zero attention. BECAUSE IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY GRAB.
So why doesn't the National Academy of Science make China their top priority? Not only is China the largest emitter of CO2, it is also the fastest growing. Not much can be done with the fully-developed countries like the US, Canada, and Japan. "Cap and trade" is really just a variant of "tax and spend", which inevitably leads to "inflate and borrow".
If this is the best these people can do, their budget should be slashed. Whoever puts out this crap is wasting my tax dollars. Let's just downsize 'em and call it our national contribution to reduce global warming.
Investigate the National Academy of Science and you will find one of those "think tank" organizations that is funded by the government in order to write white papers consisting of what the government wants to hear.
Hmmm... an organization that gets 85% of its funding from the government is advising the socialist government to enact whopping taxation. Oh my, what a surprise!
Your sarcasm is especially off-target when you face the fact that nobody in this thread has suggested that eliminating foolish users would improve the Internet. Although spam and DRM could be curtailed with smarter users, I attribute these scourges to the price of freedom.
On the other hand, an "ignore this user even when posting as AC" feature would be handy indeed.
Although I had not given it much thought until now, thanks for taking the time to point out the upside of an idiot-free internet.
Like spam, the solution to DRM is to eliminate the demand. All the laws in the world can't sell a product that people are determined not to buy (except health insurance).
If you respond to spam, you are motivating the spam industry to keep up the good work. If you buy DRM, you are accepting a substandard product and encouraging the copyright industry to offer you even more restrictions in the future. Only by eliminating the demand for crap can we eliminate the supply. The Chinese have this figured out.
If the goal is to sell more devices, then a non-DRM strategy should work even better in a market where they face a dominating opponent. Apple not only has a dominant position with the devices, they are selling music DRM-free through iTunes.
How did Nokia expect to sell more devices or more music by offering an inferior product? What MBA genius thought DRM would help them compete in the US vs. a non-DRM competitor who already has commanding market share?
Piracy is readily accepted as a fact of life in China. Just about anything that is sold on CD or DVD media is available in pirate form. Small pirate vendors outnumber legitimate stores by a wide margin. It's actually harder to buy legitimate media than the pirated stuff.
Knowing this, Nokia anticipates total rejection of DRM by Chinese consumers. Using DRM to compete with pirates is business suicide. So they don't do it.
For whatever reason, Nokia thinks they can get away with DRM in other countries. Because consumers are stupid. If they don't need DRM in the world capital of piracy, why do they need it anywhere else?
How dumb are western consumers? Spam exists because a tiny percentage of morons are still opening the messages and buying herbal Viagra. DRM exists because a tiny percentage of morons is willing to by crippled products.
The copyright industry has made it clear: Only by adopting piracy on the scale of China will DRM will go away.
A truly open XML-based file format would result in a level playing field. Without the shell game of Office file formats, businesses would be quick to dump MS Office and pocket the savings. So instead, MS can play "delay and deny" in an action to thwart open document long enough for people to forget about it. Look at the great job they did screwing up IMAP in Outlook, long enough for them to push their own proprietary IMAP-style technology in Exchange.
MS is the Verizon of software. Features that don't fit the business model are to be crippled in such a way that nobody wants them.
" Closed architecture brings negative value."
No it doesn't. IN fact, it adds value. The PC is a mess of Virus, mal-ware, crap that doesn't run right, consumers needing the guess if their PC can actually run something.
I don't have these problems on OS X or Linux. You can fire Microsoft without resorting to closed architecture.
Those disadvantages mostly go a way with a closed system.
No matter who the "gatekeeper" is, they will abuse their power to thwart useful applications that somehow challenge the gatekeeper's business model. Verizon crippled phones and Apple's block of iPhone Skype are two prime examples. Closed architecture value add? Nonsense!
So both have their pro's and cons. For most consumers having an appliance(aka closed system) is better.
Call me crazy, but I'm not buying closed architecture. I am the customer and the customer is always right.
Security through obscurity has never worked for MS, nor was it effective for the DVD industry. Or the gaming industry. Or the music industry.
Security is obtained by using strong encryption algorithms that are routinely analyzed and whose weaknesses are published. If your system cannot be analyzed by the good guys, the only people doing security analysis will be the bad guys.
The difference is that the Xbox was sold as an upgrade to pre-existing cartridge game systems. It didn't need to act like a PC. All it had to do was improve upon legacy video consoles, and play the occasional DVD. Notice how the Xbox was priced far below a PC because of the limited mission.
If you view the iPad as a colossal ipod touch, the closed architecture is not so bad. After all, the world adopted the ipod while accepting its closed architecture. But if that's your point of view, then the "ceiling" for the ipad falls far short of what competitors will be doing with netbooks in the near future. Apple went out of their way to lock down the device.
The iPad sells for less than a MacBook, but it needs to be A LOT less. Closed architecture brings negative value. I expect a hefty discount to accept these limitations. My suggestions: Add a camera, make it run OS X, and charge whatever the market will bear.
Apple's darkest days were when they used closed architecture to ensure that Apple was the sole provider of peripherals and (to a lesser extent) software. You couldn't buy a freakin' mouse without going back to Apple. Today, Apple has superb technology that can beat Microsoft (and even Linux) on the desktop. If Apple becomes arrogant and complacent, MS will close the gap, just as they did with the original Macintosh.
An incentive for more state to join the non-nuclear club is going to start a war?
Iran was a former member of the non-nuclear club. Now they are not. That train has already left the station. While Iran plays rope-a-dope with Obama, they finish deploying their nukes. The Israelis will not sit there and wait for Ahmadinejad to follow up on his famous "wiped off the map" policy.
By failing to take a tough stand vs. Iran, Obama leaves the dirty work to the Israelis. Regardless of whether the attack is fully successful, expect a new round of retaliation and conflict. Weakness brings out the worst in rivals around the world: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, China, Russia, etc.
When Israel attacks Iran, the middle east will get out of hand. Obama will be forced into yet another war at a strategic disadvantage. With US forces spread out over Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and possibly elsewhere, China invades Taiwan, North Korea re-invades South Korea, and Iran takes a chunk of Iraq. Syria tries (and probably fails) to take back some of the land lost to Israel in prior wars. Nobody at the Pentagon ever planned to fight on five or six fronts at the same time. Obama's presidency is like having a newbie substitute teacher in charge of a class of juvenile delinquents.
So to answer your question: Yes. An incentive for one more state to [re]join the non-nuclear club is part of a Carter-esque pattern of weakness that will trigger a long list of unintended consequences.
I agree, porting an Exchange database to gmail would indeed be difficult.
But starting a NEW installation is much easier if you just go with Google right out of the box. E-mail, contacts, calendars -- all synchronized across PC, Mac, and smartphones. No Exchange required. No BES for your Blackberry.
MS really does have a tremendous support system for Exchange, as does Blackberry for BES. Problem is they both need it.
I think the REAL reason why the cash customers are gouged has little to do with collections. It's the 75%+ discounts that the insurance industry and the government require. They keep the beds full, with the system running near capacity, but only because of huge discounts. After all the paperwork and nonsense, the providers are probably running at a loss because of the discounts -- but a manageable loss AND the capacity is predictable. That leaves cash customers to pick up the rest. Meanwhile, the insurance industry and government LOVE this arrangement, because cash customers are severely punished and dragged back to the captivity of insurance and government dependence.
If cash customers could pay the same heavily-discounted rates as the insurance industry and the government, the collections problem would be greatly reduced. And with medical expenses paid directly "out of pocket", patients would shop more diligently on price and try harder to avoid seeking unnecessary treatment. Notice how the problem of uncollectible accounts is never subsidized by the insurers or the government, presumably because they are not part of the collections problem. If I offer to pay on the spot, I am not part of the collections problem either. Why should I subsidize the uncollectible accounts or (even worse) the wildly expensive "claims management" process? By offering cash on the spot, I should pay a rate LOWER THAN INSURERS, GOVERNMENT, OR TRADITIONAL CUSTOMERS. Notice how it doesn't work that way, thanks to insurers and their allies in government. Notice how the proposed healthcare reform leaves the problem intact.
Here's the relevant Phil Jones quote, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm/. Decide if Dailymail (a highly politicized news source, similar to Fox News in the US) reports it honestly.
"Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?"
Jones: "Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
Score one for the Daily Mail. In other words, "I desperately tried to cherry-pick some better numbers by manipulating the cutoff date, but even that failed. But it almost worked."
And later,
"How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?"
Jones: "I'm 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity."
In other words, "I stand by the conclusions that my funding depends upon, no matter how thoroughly discredited the research becomes, no matter how much data I fail to produce, or how many FOI requests I have to ignore. Dude, it's all about the funding!"
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
At least now we know why they were illegally denying FOI requests for their data.
UN climate body admits 'mistake' on Himalayan glaciers
How many more "mistakes", falsifications, and fabrications need to be exposed before this scam goes buh-bye?
My employer has one of those "Enterprise class" IT departments. I use the phrase in quotes, because if Captain Kirk had this type of IT support on the Enterprise, Star Trek TNG would be entirely in Klingon. My wife and kids have better, more reliable networks and PC applications -- running from my HOME. At work, we suffer along with an Exchange server that takes a day off every so often. File servers are a hit-or-miss proposition. We have measurable packet loss on our own LAN! Websense blocks us from legitimate business sites. Meanwhile, the computers are locked down in such a way that half the time the automatic updates to corporate-supplied software die for lack of privileges -- but spyware plays right through.
When corporate IT simplifies its approach and cuts the MS-inspired complexity, they will discover the appeal of Macs. But not until. If Apple were to try and make the Mac as "administrator-friendly" as a PC, it would be no better than a PC. It is not easy to justify premium pricing if your product suffers from the same disease as lowball competitors.