Er, it's not a coincidence that Hitler and Stalin arose in socialist countries
Absolutism can arise in any country. Hitler's National Socialist Party was the other end of the political spectrum from the socialists and used fear of socialism and communism as a principle plank. In fact until the Nazis burned down the Reichstag to create a pretext for locking up the Communist deputies and thus giving Hitler a sufficient majority to pass the enabling act the Nazi party advertised itself as an anti-socialist party and kept the anti-semitism stuff rather more quiet.
In any case the party name was not choosen by Hitler. The Nazi party was formed long before Hitler joined and was a pretty obscure party whose platform and leadership Hitler pretty soon side-lined.
Given the current situation in the US in which people are held without trial, the government talks openly of bypassing the courts with military tribunals and the President is 'elected' on a minority of the vote after going to the supreme court to stop the votes being counted it is probably time to recognize that liberty, democracy and freedom are being protected in the US with about the same dilligence that Anderssen audited the books of Enron, Worldcom and Waste Management.
Considering that the Suprime Court itself starts all it's session with the phrase "God save the United States and this Honorable Court!", I would say that the odds of this being struck down by the suprime court are pretty high indeed.
The issue there would be standing. The only people with standing to object would be the supreme court justices theselves. However the Supremes did rule that a certain judge is not allowed to display the ten commandments. Having seen the item in question I think it should have been carried on grounds of taste alone though, the thing looked like someone made it in their backyard out of paper mache, spray painted it poorly and sold it to the gulible through late night infomertials.
The point about the pledge is that there is exactly the type of overt coertion that the court has struck down in previous prayer cases.
However since the initial rulling is simply that the lower court cannot throw the case out on de minimis grounds it is clearly not going to be going to the supreme court for quite a while. The supremes do not get involved until a question is 'ripe' that is usually not until all the lower court processes have been completed. The appeals court rulling will make it very difficult for the lower court to do any
Does Godwin's Law apply on web forum discussions? I thought that it was an observation of USENET -- are web forums a proper extension?
The ironic thing about Godwin's law is that Godwin himself is pretty notorious for starting and stoking petty flame wars on mailing lists. Basically he has a difficulty understanding that trial lawyer logic does not work too well in a context where the person being harassed has equal speaking rights.
That said, Godwin himself has admitted that in some cases comparison to Nazis is actually justified.
In Europe one of the canonical images of Facism is the picture of a teen age aryan boy saluting the Nazi flag one of Lenni Rehsenfal's images from Triumph of the Will. The canonical image of communism were the May day parades and the pictures of school children holding up placards to make pictures of Mao and Stalin.
We associate the saluting of flags with the military and the militarization of civilian life with totalitarianism.
I think my favorite quote is "those that would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security" -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Letter to Josiah Quincy, Sept. 11, 1773.
How about Edmund Burke's coment of roughly the same era to the effect that 'it is astonishing how much noise a collection of slave owners can make about liberty'.
Before the comments start to get out of hand, I'd like to point out that this will almost certainly be overturned by the Supreme Court. The Ninth Circuit has pulled this stunt many a time before, only to have it overturned or reverse itself later.
I don't see how that is so certain. In the first place the current supreme court has rulled several times against school prayer.
The principal objection raised by the government was that the courts should not be concerned with trivial infractions. It would be very hard for the Supreme Court to claim that a case was important enough to consider and then rule that it was too insignificant to bother with.
The rest of the world finds the fetish the US makes over its flag somewhat peculiar. The scenes of schoolchildren making loyalty oaths to the flag every day remind Europeans such as myself more of the types of society that Stalin and Hitler tried to impose than the values of liberal democracy.
Finally the main objection to the pledge historically has been from religious groups, in particular the Quakers. For us the pledge of allegiance to a physical object is tantamount to idol worship which we have rather strong view against. Furthermore we don't make oaths by heaven for that is of God, nor by earth as that is his footstool.
You've yet to offer any argument as to why voluntary private accounts would be a bad thing. What are specific reasons why the current system is better, and what if anything do you propose to do about its increasing insolvency?
Everyone should have a private account invested in a growth investment. However everyone should also have a cash position.
The point is that you might be perfectly responsible investing for yourself but the majority are not. The point of social security is that no matter bow irresponsible the employees of Enron are with their 401K they still have a pension.
The problem with 100% private schemes is that if people invest unwisely they are inevitably going to force the government to bail them out.
The other problem is that the social security receipts are used to fund current social security spending and so if you give people private pension accounts you then have to find some way to pay existing retirees.
Under the GOP privatization plans Social Security would be insolvent ten years earlier than without.
Yes, folks, let's just ignore the Gartner Group's report and teams of statisticans and accountants, and take the snecdotal word of Zeinfeld, local Slashdot Apple-bashing troll.
I would rather trust Andersen than Gartner, Giga or any other of the analyst firms.
Are you referring to an independent, unbiased report or was the report commissioned by Apple?
The way most analyst reports work is that a company pays the analyst company a lot of money and the analyst company then produces a favorable report. If that turns out to be impossible the report does not get published.
Because people tend to be dubious of analyst reports purchased in this way a lot of analysts now insist that they publish 'independent' reports. What this means is that the analyst is not paid for the report itself, they are paid to participate in conference calls with financial analysts, or other 'consulting' activities.
So, yes, I am ignoring the Gartner report, none of the analyst companies has any credibility with me whatsoever.
Interesting, these days on slashdot you can criticise Linux, you can even praise Microsoft, you can even criticize Israel without getting modded down. But state some facts about Apple and you are going to get modded down as a troll.
I think that is more evidence that the Apple fanatics are in denial.
As for the current state of the company. I don't think that the computer hardware business is going to be particularly good for anyone in comming years. Apple and Sun are always going to be most vulnerable because they use custom processor designs and do their volumes are simply not great enough to fund enough R&D to keep up with Intel and AMD.
Even the Apple fanatics in the thread admit that Apple performance is off by 20% compared to Intel. That is despite the advantage that PowerPC has of a RISC instruction set. Apple no longer sell their machines on performance, three years ago they did. What happens in three years time when the performance gap is likely to be Intel is acknowledged to be twice as fast??
And don't try to pretend that performance does not matter. Three years ago we were being told it was everything and users would flock to Mac to get performance (even though Apple has never led in price/performance).
That will only grow. Net interest on debt cannot be tapped, and all other categories are dwarfed by entitlement spending. There simply is not ``plenty of discretionary spending'' to re-assign to save SS.
The administration is currently pushing to make the repeal of estate taxes permanent - which will cost $10bn a year.
The US spends more on 'defense' than the rest of the world combined. Much of the expenditure has no connection to defense at all, it is simply a convenient place to put pork where it is least likely to be objected to. And of the actual military spending there is plenty of waste that can be cut, that the Pentagon is actually asking to be allowed to cut, military bases whose sole purpose is putting money into a local economy, weapons systems that the chiefs of staff dont want - Osprey, Crusader, etc.
Of course there are a lot of vested interests who want to scare people into letting them privatise their pensions. Only thing is that the people trying to scare them are the same crooks who ran WorldCom and Enron.
What is the betting that in the next couple of days we see another terror alert just as the press start to ask questions about the administrations involvement in Enron and what happened to the promised reforms of accounting practices?
Of course anyone accusing the administration of such a cynical ploy would be evil and unpatriotic.
And while the press argues over the terror alert the World Com crooks will be collecting their $1.6 million a year pensions.
You have no money "invested" in Social Security. There is no account with your name on it (nor is there any "trust fund"), and you have no legal claim to any benefits whatsoever
This is untrue, there is an actual filling cabinet that holds the actual US Treasury bonds that are owned by the trust fund.
The accounting records kept by Social Security are no less real than those held by your bank. The only differences between Social Security and a real pension fund is that Social Security is only allowed to invest in the investment that gives the lowest return and the pension fund owners regularly borrow against the reserve.
That does not matter a whole lot because however 'insolvent' the trust fund might appear to become the US govt has plenty of discretionary spending to cut and can increase taxes if required.
The point of social security is not that it should be your only pension plan, it is simply a minimum pension plan that everyone is required to take out to make sure that the government does not end up with a large population of geriatric electors with no income who would inevitably vote themselves state aid.
Well protectionism always 'works' in the sense that tarif barriers keep cheaper or better foreign goods out. But protectionism also leads to retaliation by the disadvantaged countries that costs US jobs and more importantly to higher US prices which also costs US jobs. In the case of steel a few thousand steel worker jobs are being saved at the cost of ten thousand workers in the car industry and other steel intensive industries. And on top of that consumers will be forced to pay higher prices which leads to inflation, higher interest rates and loss of jobs.
Face it -- the current administration is moving America in a more and more isolationalist direction.
I don't think it is isolationism so much as losing relevance. Whether the 'President' gets fast track negotiating authority or not is irrelevant now because whether or not he gets the authority the US is not a credible partner for trade negotiations. Bush has shown signs that he wants to walk the world stage as a major leader but at this point the only countries friendly to him are the UK, Israel and Afghanistan.
Armed resistance doesn't require targeting civilians first. Resistance doesn't even require violence. "Atrocities" only demonstrate that the perpetrators are too politically immature to be trusted.
For 40 years the US and USSR were prepared to destroy all life on the planet to preserve their political systems.
The Palestinians could be a heck of a lot more successful if they applied Ghandian passive resistance. But that is not going to happen and it is utterly futile to demand that one side does not target civilians when the occupying power is targetting civilians.
The reason I made the comparison to the RIAA is that in each case we have a group that believes it has a monopoly of political influence and that this will enable it to make and sustain irrational political demands.
The problem with morality is that it is not comparitive. An unjust demand is not justified by unjustifiable methods of resistance. Suicide bombers don't justify the Israelis apartheid system, the settlements or the occupation any more than the apartheid system, the settlements and the occupation do not justify suicide bombings.
I remember because I grew up in Rochester, NY where Kodak was big. I suppose this was a US law to protect US businesses from foreign competition, and as such it wouldn't apply to a domestic business selling in the US.
I believe that in that case the law in question was the notorious US 'anti-dumping' legislation. This allows pretty much any form of foreign competition to be labelled 'dumping' and protectionist tarifs applied.
In the Kodak case the issue was that Fuji was selling film to supermarkets etc. who were then selling it as own branded products. This allowed Fuji to rapidly establish a national distribution channel that started to take business from Kodak's more expensive product. Kodak rang up its congressmen and asked what they were paying them for, a trumped up case was sent to the trade commission which decided for protectionism.
It is the same thing with the steel tarifs. The US integrated steel producers are unecconomic for two reasons, first the companies never set up a proper pension fund so the companies have massive liabilities for pensions etc. for retirees, the second bigger problem is that mini-mill technology can produce steel for less than half the cost due to lower capital costs and the ability to blend in recycled steel.
In practice US protectionism tends to only 'work' against Japan which has similar protectionist mechanisms. When the US imposed tarifs on Japanese film and supercomputers, Japan quietly retaliated in other areas. The recent steel tarifs are something of a novelty in that the Bushies took on the EU which is selectively retaliating, targetting companies in marginal states that made campaign contibutions to Bush and the GOP. Interesting thing is that there is some evidence that the big auto makers may be buying foreign steel anyway and refusing to place contracts with the US firms, reconning that their best long term strategy is to push the US suppliers under rather than have them lobbying against them.
There are also anti-trust provisions that prohibit selling bellow cost for the purposes of driving competitors out of a market. But selling for a loss is OK if you are not a monopolist (which Microsoft is not in the video game sector) and also OK if done for a legitmate business reason. In the case of video games every company has a razor and blades business model in which the console is sold at a loss so that they can sell the games.
Thank you for the insight, Elmer FUD. Apple is doing just fine at the moment.
Apple made a loss last year and in its previous year only made 750 million, that is not so good for a computer company, Dell made $1.2 billion and $2.2 billion in the same periods. More importantly the long term trend in AAPL revenues has been to climb for a few years then collapse. OK so AAPL revenues grew from 1998 to 2000, but they crashed in 2001 and in 1998. Now most companies revenues in the computer industry were off last year, but most computer companies grew in 1998.
I'd bet the profit margin on the iPod is very slim, whereas the profit margin on a PowerMac is larger than the retail price of the iPod (in any case, much larger).
On the contrary, the iPod can sell for a much higher percentage markup for good design than a computer can. The iPod retails for $500 which is about $200 higher than competing products from the likes of Archos - and the price differential is maintained after inevitable retail discounts. I don't think that even Apple could sustain a 66% premium in the notebook market.
In 5 years time the benchmark price for all PCs is likely to have dropped to $500. Bargain basement pieces of crap will probably be available for $200. Cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players and the like will still be available for $50, but designer labels will be able to charge $300 to $500 for genuinely better products.
The only good reason I have heard to buy an Apple computer is that their high end G4 laptops are pretty much the best portable arround to run UNIX on out of the box. If like myself you absolutely loathe Mac look and feel you can even run Gnome on top.
I have macs running that are 8 years old [and older] and they still work just as well as they did when they came out of the box. Nothing has been replaced in these, I just added some more RAM. That's something you don't usually see in wintel machines... instead you see planned obsolescence.
That does not sit too well with my experience at the AI lab. Every model of powerbook required its own power supply - a trick that some WinTel manufacturers like Sony have adopted but many do not.
More seriously, incompatible interfaces introduced to force purchase of a new monitor with a new machine, render peripherals obsolete, etc. etc. Even when people were sold a machine with the promise of upgradability Apple thought nothing of breaking the promise - which eventually was made good in a consent decree.
Still the Apple appologists will go on supporting the company no matter what in the manner of a party pundit on a sunday morning talk show: "President Bush has been filmed holding a gang bang on Air Force One, how does that stand with his promise to maintain familly values and bring honour back to the White House?", "Well I think it sits very well, you will note that he held the gang bang on Air Force One and not the sacred soil of the Oval Office as did the anti-christ Clinton and in fulfillment of his 'familly values agenda' he made sure that invitations were sent out to his wife and children".
Shouldn't it be the other way around? I thought radios had to pay the RIAA for each single played. Who's screwing who? Or is this some cartel keeping out the little players?
This is true, the radio companies do pay for paying the music and the labels pay to get it played. The reason for this is that it is two different groups paying and being paid.
A long time ago the recording industry agreed to separate mechanical reproduction rights from performance rights. When a CD is made it is governed by the mechanical rights. A radio or Internet broadcast is a performance right. The labels take 100% of the mechanical rights and the composers get 100% of the performance rights. Doing the split this way means that the composers don't have to trust the labels to honestly report their sales.
That is why the recording industry does not want Internet radio, p2P or the rest, they don't own the rights. The real point of the Hollings bill (what is it called this week? DALEK?) is that once the vehicle is on its way an ammendment will be slipped in behind closed doors to steal the performance rights from the composers.
This situation is a bit like the situation in Israel, Shaorn would like peace but he cannot resist the temptation to appropriate the Palestinian's property for settlements. Then when the inevitable attrocity happens they go asking for sympathy. In the same way the RIAA is scared stiff of the threat of piracy but it just can't resist the temptation to loot, just as they could not resist the temptation to steal artist's recovered rights in the DMCA. But when Napster or Bearshare comes along the threat to private property is soooo desperate that immediate legislation is required to force all PCs to be tricked up with DRM within 24 hours.
Ultimately I think we will see radio displaced by Internet Radio and Satelite Radio. The cost advantages of addressing a larger market are devastating. The real problems are lack of the right standards for distribution and the lack of appropriate hardware. I don't want to tie up my PC with Internet radio, nor do I want to have to lug a PC with me just for radio. I want my Internet radio device to connect to my home network via WiFi and play any station I might want to listen to, or play from my (ripped) CD collection on the main server.
Can anyone give me a substantial difference between a virtual machine, and an emulator...
Yes, an emulator simulates a piece of hardware that once existed, a Virtual Machine is an idealised machine.
The difference is significant because many Virtual Machines have features that either cannot be supported in hardware or would be prohibitively expensive. This is the principle design difference between the original Java VM and the Microsoft.NET CLI. The original Java VM was designed so that it could be implemented as silicon gates, the.NET CLI could be implemented in Silicon if you really tried really hard and were a complete masochist but that was never a design goal.
I don't know about the second Java VM, my interest in Java VM kinda died after it was clear Sun wanted no external inputs they did not control absolutely. I would guess that the redesign would be towards a more abstract representation that would allow for better JIT compilation.
Strictly speaking.NET does not use a VM, it uses an intermediate compiler representation, however any turing complete representation could be called a VM. The distinction matters because you can compile.NET code down to the Java VM if you choose but going the other way would not be a great idea...
I wonder if Steve's going to patch the iPod to make it incompatible with 3rd party software such as this?
They are probbly not that clueless, but trying to boost sales of Mac by tying the iPod to it was a real clueless move in the first place.
The problem Jobs has is that the iPod market is 5% of the size of the market that Archos, Nomad et. al. have access for. I don't think anyone is ever going to buy a Mac just to use an iPod.
While the software probably works OK the only way it is going to allow iPod to significantly penetrate the Windows market is if Apple has enough clues to bundle it.
Apple could have rescued the company by switching from being just a computer company with a stagnant and declining market share to an intelligent device company. But it can't do that if they tie their new products to trying to save their old one.
What Apple management simply canot get into their heads is that the fanaticism of Apple users does not mean that the rest of the world is wanting to switch to Mac.
Please notice that MS has -VERY- little to do with designing their own hardware. They outsource the design and manufacture, and just slap their name on it.
Well yes and no, the only reason the hardware division exists is that Bill wanted a funny shaped keyboard and a feedback joystick and there was no other company making either at the time.
Come to that, the only reason they did the flight simulator was so Bill could play it.
Bill is just an uber geek with better toys than the rest of us and a company to build more if he runs out. The only reason MSFT gets stick on/. is that the lesser geeks get jealous.
Is it so far-fetched that Microsoft is actually trying to provide it's users with the features that they want?
I doubt that there are many people clamouring for client side java. I have yet to visit a site that uses Java since I installed XP.
These days everything seems to be Macromedia Flash, only if someone would work out a way to block flash downloads I would do it in a flash as the abuse by advertisers is getting ridiculous. Unfortunately Microsoft didn't think to include the 'no I don't want to download that crap and don't ever, ever ask me again' option.
I suspect that this is simply Microsoft having demonstrated to Sun that its users are not demanding Java is now thinking it might sell a few more copies of J# if they distribute a VM again.
The House of Lords is made up of an eccentric bunch of old codgers. But that's one of the reasons it works. They might be eccentric, but they hold a few things dear and one of those is civil rights.
The cure for admiration for the house of Lords is to see them at work. They are mostly a bunch of worn out party hacks who are selected on their pliability.
The Tories in the HoL may be depended on to block Labour attacks on civil rights, unfortunately most attacks come from the Tory party itself. The HoL did very little to block the attacks on civil liberties from Michael Howard. Would they have blocked the RIP bill ifit had been proposed by a Tory?
The HoL has on balance had more negative than positive effects. The HoL threw out two Home Rule bills for Ireland which led to the IRA.
The HoL has an important function and executes it very baddly.
I get an even bigger difference if I use my full name
Google 7,760. Search took 0.39 seconds
AllTheWeb 1,761
However if I search on only my surname (which is very rare) I get
Google about 11,000.
All the Web 11,374
This basically corresponds to cases where I am cited by first initial only.
This indicates to me that Google has much more accurate discrimination functions on cross matches.
Re:So let me get this straight.
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I suppose Wolfram, being a physicist and therefore having no real clue of math, means that a model consisting just of smooth operator equations won't be sufficient.
Actually Steve was not really a physicist per se, he was a mathematician/computer geek type who happened to hang out with physicists and dabble in their field while making use of the ludicrously lavish resources that particle physicists have access to. He was at the Rutherford labs about five years before I worked with the people there in the same sort of semi-detached role.
In developing Mathematica Steve pretty much worked the field of mathematics. To call him 'only a physicist' sounds to me like someone trying desperately to promote themselves by putting others down.
Where people can legitimately ask what Wolfram has been playing at is his stweardship of Wolfram Research these past ten years. Back in 1994 a whole new version of Mathematica came out that was very close to being a Web browser. I talked to him about something in that line, he got al excited and... nothing happened. It is clear now that he missed the Internet explosion while he was writing the damned book.
Where Wolfram Research is really vulnerable is the ridiculous cost of their product. If you thin MSFT price gouges compare the price of Excel and Mathematica. If someone coulf work out a way to graft SMP functionality into a spreadsheet style interface they could take Wolfram Research appart.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutism can arise in any country. Hitler's National Socialist Party was the other end of the political spectrum from the socialists and used fear of socialism and communism as a principle plank. In fact until the Nazis burned down the Reichstag to create a pretext for locking up the Communist deputies and thus giving Hitler a sufficient majority to pass the enabling act the Nazi party advertised itself as an anti-socialist party and kept the anti-semitism stuff rather more quiet.
In any case the party name was not choosen by Hitler. The Nazi party was formed long before Hitler joined and was a pretty obscure party whose platform and leadership Hitler pretty soon side-lined.
Given the current situation in the US in which people are held without trial, the government talks openly of bypassing the courts with military tribunals and the President is 'elected' on a minority of the vote after going to the supreme court to stop the votes being counted it is probably time to recognize that liberty, democracy and freedom are being protected in the US with about the same dilligence that Anderssen audited the books of Enron, Worldcom and Waste Management.
The issue there would be standing. The only people with standing to object would be the supreme court justices theselves. However the Supremes did rule that a certain judge is not allowed to display the ten commandments. Having seen the item in question I think it should have been carried on grounds of taste alone though, the thing looked like someone made it in their backyard out of paper mache, spray painted it poorly and sold it to the gulible through late night infomertials.
The point about the pledge is that there is exactly the type of overt coertion that the court has struck down in previous prayer cases.
However since the initial rulling is simply that the lower court cannot throw the case out on de minimis grounds it is clearly not going to be going to the supreme court for quite a while. The supremes do not get involved until a question is 'ripe' that is usually not until all the lower court processes have been completed. The appeals court rulling will make it very difficult for the lower court to do any
The ironic thing about Godwin's law is that Godwin himself is pretty notorious for starting and stoking petty flame wars on mailing lists. Basically he has a difficulty understanding that trial lawyer logic does not work too well in a context where the person being harassed has equal speaking rights.
That said, Godwin himself has admitted that in some cases comparison to Nazis is actually justified.
In Europe one of the canonical images of Facism is the picture of a teen age aryan boy saluting the Nazi flag one of Lenni Rehsenfal's images from Triumph of the Will. The canonical image of communism were the May day parades and the pictures of school children holding up placards to make pictures of Mao and Stalin.
We associate the saluting of flags with the military and the militarization of civilian life with totalitarianism.
How about Edmund Burke's coment of roughly the same era to the effect that 'it is astonishing how much noise a collection of slave owners can make about liberty'.
I don't see how that is so certain. In the first place the current supreme court has rulled several times against school prayer.
The principal objection raised by the government was that the courts should not be concerned with trivial infractions. It would be very hard for the Supreme Court to claim that a case was important enough to consider and then rule that it was too insignificant to bother with.
The rest of the world finds the fetish the US makes over its flag somewhat peculiar. The scenes of schoolchildren making loyalty oaths to the flag every day remind Europeans such as myself more of the types of society that Stalin and Hitler tried to impose than the values of liberal democracy.
Finally the main objection to the pledge historically has been from religious groups, in particular the Quakers. For us the pledge of allegiance to a physical object is tantamount to idol worship which we have rather strong view against. Furthermore we don't make oaths by heaven for that is of God, nor by earth as that is his footstool.
Everyone should have a private account invested in a growth investment. However everyone should also have a cash position.
The point is that you might be perfectly responsible investing for yourself but the majority are not. The point of social security is that no matter bow irresponsible the employees of Enron are with their 401K they still have a pension.
The problem with 100% private schemes is that if people invest unwisely they are inevitably going to force the government to bail them out.
The other problem is that the social security receipts are used to fund current social security spending and so if you give people private pension accounts you then have to find some way to pay existing retirees.
Under the GOP privatization plans Social Security would be insolvent ten years earlier than without.
I would rather trust Andersen than Gartner, Giga or any other of the analyst firms.
Are you referring to an independent, unbiased report or was the report commissioned by Apple?
The way most analyst reports work is that a company pays the analyst company a lot of money and the analyst company then produces a favorable report. If that turns out to be impossible the report does not get published.
Because people tend to be dubious of analyst reports purchased in this way a lot of analysts now insist that they publish 'independent' reports. What this means is that the analyst is not paid for the report itself, they are paid to participate in conference calls with financial analysts, or other 'consulting' activities.
So, yes, I am ignoring the Gartner report, none of the analyst companies has any credibility with me whatsoever.
I think that is more evidence that the Apple fanatics are in denial.
As for the current state of the company. I don't think that the computer hardware business is going to be particularly good for anyone in comming years. Apple and Sun are always going to be most vulnerable because they use custom processor designs and do their volumes are simply not great enough to fund enough R&D to keep up with Intel and AMD.
Even the Apple fanatics in the thread admit that Apple performance is off by 20% compared to Intel. That is despite the advantage that PowerPC has of a RISC instruction set. Apple no longer sell their machines on performance, three years ago they did. What happens in three years time when the performance gap is likely to be Intel is acknowledged to be twice as fast??
And don't try to pretend that performance does not matter. Three years ago we were being told it was everything and users would flock to Mac to get performance (even though Apple has never led in price/performance).
The administration is currently pushing to make the repeal of estate taxes permanent - which will cost $10bn a year.
The US spends more on 'defense' than the rest of the world combined. Much of the expenditure has no connection to defense at all, it is simply a convenient place to put pork where it is least likely to be objected to. And of the actual military spending there is plenty of waste that can be cut, that the Pentagon is actually asking to be allowed to cut, military bases whose sole purpose is putting money into a local economy, weapons systems that the chiefs of staff dont want - Osprey, Crusader, etc.
Of course there are a lot of vested interests who want to scare people into letting them privatise their pensions. Only thing is that the people trying to scare them are the same crooks who ran WorldCom and Enron.
Of course anyone accusing the administration of such a cynical ploy would be evil and unpatriotic.
And while the press argues over the terror alert the World Com crooks will be collecting their $1.6 million a year pensions.
This is untrue, there is an actual filling cabinet that holds the actual US Treasury bonds that are owned by the trust fund.
The accounting records kept by Social Security are no less real than those held by your bank. The only differences between Social Security and a real pension fund is that Social Security is only allowed to invest in the investment that gives the lowest return and the pension fund owners regularly borrow against the reserve.
That does not matter a whole lot because however 'insolvent' the trust fund might appear to become the US govt has plenty of discretionary spending to cut and can increase taxes if required.
The point of social security is not that it should be your only pension plan, it is simply a minimum pension plan that everyone is required to take out to make sure that the government does not end up with a large population of geriatric electors with no income who would inevitably vote themselves state aid.
Well protectionism always 'works' in the sense that tarif barriers keep cheaper or better foreign goods out. But protectionism also leads to retaliation by the disadvantaged countries that costs US jobs and more importantly to higher US prices which also costs US jobs. In the case of steel a few thousand steel worker jobs are being saved at the cost of ten thousand workers in the car industry and other steel intensive industries. And on top of that consumers will be forced to pay higher prices which leads to inflation, higher interest rates and loss of jobs.
Face it -- the current administration is moving America in a more and more isolationalist direction.
I don't think it is isolationism so much as losing relevance. Whether the 'President' gets fast track negotiating authority or not is irrelevant now because whether or not he gets the authority the US is not a credible partner for trade negotiations. Bush has shown signs that he wants to walk the world stage as a major leader but at this point the only countries friendly to him are the UK, Israel and Afghanistan.
For 40 years the US and USSR were prepared to destroy all life on the planet to preserve their political systems.
The Palestinians could be a heck of a lot more successful if they applied Ghandian passive resistance. But that is not going to happen and it is utterly futile to demand that one side does not target civilians when the occupying power is targetting civilians.
The reason I made the comparison to the RIAA is that in each case we have a group that believes it has a monopoly of political influence and that this will enable it to make and sustain irrational political demands.
The problem with morality is that it is not comparitive. An unjust demand is not justified by unjustifiable methods of resistance. Suicide bombers don't justify the Israelis apartheid system, the settlements or the occupation any more than the apartheid system, the settlements and the occupation do not justify suicide bombings.
I believe that in that case the law in question was the notorious US 'anti-dumping' legislation. This allows pretty much any form of foreign competition to be labelled 'dumping' and protectionist tarifs applied.
In the Kodak case the issue was that Fuji was selling film to supermarkets etc. who were then selling it as own branded products. This allowed Fuji to rapidly establish a national distribution channel that started to take business from Kodak's more expensive product. Kodak rang up its congressmen and asked what they were paying them for, a trumped up case was sent to the trade commission which decided for protectionism.
It is the same thing with the steel tarifs. The US integrated steel producers are unecconomic for two reasons, first the companies never set up a proper pension fund so the companies have massive liabilities for pensions etc. for retirees, the second bigger problem is that mini-mill technology can produce steel for less than half the cost due to lower capital costs and the ability to blend in recycled steel.
In practice US protectionism tends to only 'work' against Japan which has similar protectionist mechanisms. When the US imposed tarifs on Japanese film and supercomputers, Japan quietly retaliated in other areas. The recent steel tarifs are something of a novelty in that the Bushies took on the EU which is selectively retaliating, targetting companies in marginal states that made campaign contibutions to Bush and the GOP. Interesting thing is that there is some evidence that the big auto makers may be buying foreign steel anyway and refusing to place contracts with the US firms, reconning that their best long term strategy is to push the US suppliers under rather than have them lobbying against them.
There are also anti-trust provisions that prohibit selling bellow cost for the purposes of driving competitors out of a market. But selling for a loss is OK if you are not a monopolist (which Microsoft is not in the video game sector) and also OK if done for a legitmate business reason. In the case of video games every company has a razor and blades business model in which the console is sold at a loss so that they can sell the games.
Apple made a loss last year and in its previous year only made 750 million, that is not so good for a computer company, Dell made $1.2 billion and $2.2 billion in the same periods. More importantly the long term trend in AAPL revenues has been to climb for a few years then collapse. OK so AAPL revenues grew from 1998 to 2000, but they crashed in 2001 and in 1998. Now most companies revenues in the computer industry were off last year, but most computer companies grew in 1998.
I'd bet the profit margin on the iPod is very slim, whereas the profit margin on a PowerMac is larger than the retail price of the iPod (in any case, much larger).
On the contrary, the iPod can sell for a much higher percentage markup for good design than a computer can. The iPod retails for $500 which is about $200 higher than competing products from the likes of Archos - and the price differential is maintained after inevitable retail discounts. I don't think that even Apple could sustain a 66% premium in the notebook market.
In 5 years time the benchmark price for all PCs is likely to have dropped to $500. Bargain basement pieces of crap will probably be available for $200. Cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players and the like will still be available for $50, but designer labels will be able to charge $300 to $500 for genuinely better products.
The only good reason I have heard to buy an Apple computer is that their high end G4 laptops are pretty much the best portable arround to run UNIX on out of the box. If like myself you absolutely loathe Mac look and feel you can even run Gnome on top.
That does not sit too well with my experience at the AI lab. Every model of powerbook required its own power supply - a trick that some WinTel manufacturers like Sony have adopted but many do not.
More seriously, incompatible interfaces introduced to force purchase of a new monitor with a new machine, render peripherals obsolete, etc. etc. Even when people were sold a machine with the promise of upgradability Apple thought nothing of breaking the promise - which eventually was made good in a consent decree.
Still the Apple appologists will go on supporting the company no matter what in the manner of a party pundit on a sunday morning talk show: "President Bush has been filmed holding a gang bang on Air Force One, how does that stand with his promise to maintain familly values and bring honour back to the White House?", "Well I think it sits very well, you will note that he held the gang bang on Air Force One and not the sacred soil of the Oval Office as did the anti-christ Clinton and in fulfillment of his 'familly values agenda' he made sure that invitations were sent out to his wife and children".
This is true, the radio companies do pay for paying the music and the labels pay to get it played. The reason for this is that it is two different groups paying and being paid.
A long time ago the recording industry agreed to separate mechanical reproduction rights from performance rights. When a CD is made it is governed by the mechanical rights. A radio or Internet broadcast is a performance right. The labels take 100% of the mechanical rights and the composers get 100% of the performance rights. Doing the split this way means that the composers don't have to trust the labels to honestly report their sales.
That is why the recording industry does not want Internet radio, p2P or the rest, they don't own the rights. The real point of the Hollings bill (what is it called this week? DALEK?) is that once the vehicle is on its way an ammendment will be slipped in behind closed doors to steal the performance rights from the composers.
This situation is a bit like the situation in Israel, Shaorn would like peace but he cannot resist the temptation to appropriate the Palestinian's property for settlements. Then when the inevitable attrocity happens they go asking for sympathy. In the same way the RIAA is scared stiff of the threat of piracy but it just can't resist the temptation to loot, just as they could not resist the temptation to steal artist's recovered rights in the DMCA. But when Napster or Bearshare comes along the threat to private property is soooo desperate that immediate legislation is required to force all PCs to be tricked up with DRM within 24 hours.
Ultimately I think we will see radio displaced by Internet Radio and Satelite Radio. The cost advantages of addressing a larger market are devastating. The real problems are lack of the right standards for distribution and the lack of appropriate hardware. I don't want to tie up my PC with Internet radio, nor do I want to have to lug a PC with me just for radio. I want my Internet radio device to connect to my home network via WiFi and play any station I might want to listen to, or play from my (ripped) CD collection on the main server.
Yes, an emulator simulates a piece of hardware that once existed, a Virtual Machine is an idealised machine.
The difference is significant because many Virtual Machines have features that either cannot be supported in hardware or would be prohibitively expensive. This is the principle design difference between the original Java VM and the Microsoft .NET CLI. The original Java VM was designed so that it could be implemented as silicon gates, the .NET CLI could be implemented in Silicon if you really tried really hard and were a complete masochist but that was never a design goal.
I don't know about the second Java VM, my interest in Java VM kinda died after it was clear Sun wanted no external inputs they did not control absolutely. I would guess that the redesign would be towards a more abstract representation that would allow for better JIT compilation.
Strictly speaking .NET does not use a VM, it uses an intermediate compiler representation, however any turing complete representation could be called a VM. The distinction matters because you can compile .NET code down to the Java VM if you choose but going the other way would not be a great idea...
They are probbly not that clueless, but trying to boost sales of Mac by tying the iPod to it was a real clueless move in the first place.
The problem Jobs has is that the iPod market is 5% of the size of the market that Archos, Nomad et. al. have access for. I don't think anyone is ever going to buy a Mac just to use an iPod.
While the software probably works OK the only way it is going to allow iPod to significantly penetrate the Windows market is if Apple has enough clues to bundle it.
Apple could have rescued the company by switching from being just a computer company with a stagnant and declining market share to an intelligent device company. But it can't do that if they tie their new products to trying to save their old one.
What Apple management simply canot get into their heads is that the fanaticism of Apple users does not mean that the rest of the world is wanting to switch to Mac.
Well yes and no, the only reason the hardware division exists is that Bill wanted a funny shaped keyboard and a feedback joystick and there was no other company making either at the time.
Come to that, the only reason they did the flight simulator was so Bill could play it.
Bill is just an uber geek with better toys than the rest of us and a company to build more if he runs out. The only reason MSFT gets stick on /. is that the lesser geeks get jealous.
I doubt that there are many people clamouring for client side java. I have yet to visit a site that uses Java since I installed XP.
These days everything seems to be Macromedia Flash, only if someone would work out a way to block flash downloads I would do it in a flash as the abuse by advertisers is getting ridiculous. Unfortunately Microsoft didn't think to include the 'no I don't want to download that crap and don't ever, ever ask me again' option.
I suspect that this is simply Microsoft having demonstrated to Sun that its users are not demanding Java is now thinking it might sell a few more copies of J# if they distribute a VM again.
The cure for admiration for the house of Lords is to see them at work. They are mostly a bunch of worn out party hacks who are selected on their pliability.
The Tories in the HoL may be depended on to block Labour attacks on civil rights, unfortunately most attacks come from the Tory party itself. The HoL did very little to block the attacks on civil liberties from Michael Howard. Would they have blocked the RIP bill ifit had been proposed by a Tory?
The HoL has on balance had more negative than positive effects. The HoL threw out two Home Rule bills for Ireland which led to the IRA.
The HoL has an important function and executes it very baddly.
Rare as in there are only five living people who use the name and of them I am the only one with Internet access.
Google 7,760. Search took 0.39 seconds
AllTheWeb 1,761
However if I search on only my surname (which is very rare) I get
Google about 11,000. All the Web 11,374
This basically corresponds to cases where I am cited by first initial only.
This indicates to me that Google has much more accurate discrimination functions on cross matches.
Actually Steve was not really a physicist per se, he was a mathematician/computer geek type who happened to hang out with physicists and dabble in their field while making use of the ludicrously lavish resources that particle physicists have access to. He was at the Rutherford labs about five years before I worked with the people there in the same sort of semi-detached role.
In developing Mathematica Steve pretty much worked the field of mathematics. To call him 'only a physicist' sounds to me like someone trying desperately to promote themselves by putting others down.
Where people can legitimately ask what Wolfram has been playing at is his stweardship of Wolfram Research these past ten years. Back in 1994 a whole new version of Mathematica came out that was very close to being a Web browser. I talked to him about something in that line, he got al excited and... nothing happened. It is clear now that he missed the Internet explosion while he was writing the damned book.
Where Wolfram Research is really vulnerable is the ridiculous cost of their product. If you thin MSFT price gouges compare the price of Excel and Mathematica. If someone coulf work out a way to graft SMP functionality into a spreadsheet style interface they could take Wolfram Research appart.