Eliminating world povery is also a matter of national security.
Our "War on Poverty" in the US has had little success eliminating poverty in our own backyard... that said, American poverty is very different than poverty in a third world nation. The amazing thing is the attitude that prevails:
* Free Trade costs the US jobs! * Free Trade SUXORS for the third world (no it doesn't! you can't go from hunter/gatherer economy to $20K/year avg income overnight, free trade is fairly intollerant of corruption and graft, too) * The family farm must be protected! (this is a code for "we must subsidize our farmers so food is produced here" * My god, we are sending our best jobs to Mexico/India/Singapore/etc...
What people fail to grasp is that people outside of Europe and North America have the same needs that we do. When NAFTA drove jobs to Mexico, it started a 100 year cycle where the worker in Mexico is in higher demand, will gain escalating skills and ultimately will see wages ballance with the industrialized world. It's just so easy to forget that those poor people in _________ country are people no different than you and I - they just were not fortunate enough to be born where opportunity exist.
I do believe, though that the solution to poverty is not debt. Taking a nation and making it pay 30% of the gdp to service loans is a sure way to cause poverty.
Mandatory Black Boxes are clearly a violation of the constitutions prohibition on self-incrimination. Even if they were mandated... I would be surprised if they were admisable.
If my car had one the first thing i'd do is take it out and hook it up to 120V AC for 10 minutes.
After reading the article "cut costs" seems to be the theme... put an e-Machine in a cow print box... voila, your new gateway! Kind of reminds me of the first Toyota/Lexus models...
MS will not mess with the open source world because it opens a can of worms so deep that they will never get them back in the can:
- The open source community is very good at uncovering prior art. - The community has a knack for knowing when technologies were invented, and this can dramatically alter the length of time a patent can be held. - Messing with the Open Source community is bad marketing... look what is happening to SCO. - MS benefits substantially by "innovating" off of open source products and protocols.
Oh well - guess it's pretty hard to write a fictional future piece without injecting bizzare humor into it.
Or ruining it with predictions that have nothing to do with what you are predicting. The whole article's irrelevant because in nine years the world will be underwater from rising sea levels due do global warming, then frozen solid by nuclear winter, and generally burnt to a crisp by unfiltered solar radiation from the ozone layer checking out.
Right? Right?
In this case, Left, Right? Or somewhere that isn't the center.
It's all in a name. Why even write an article about when "GNU is NOT Unix" will become certified Unix. This is a lot like having, say anarchists revolt and form a tolitarian government. Next article please.
eBooks will languish so long as they are priced higher than paperback or hardcover. Why would you want to pay 2x what I'd pay for paperback for an eBook that requires all kinds of complicated keys / DRM that will royally screw up when you change computers in six months?
BTW - my favorite format for eBooks w/o picutres is ascii or ansi text... my favorite for those with graphical content is non-DRMd PDFs... Funky proprietary ebook formats are useless...
Gartner is in the business of selling "reports" and "studies".
Actually, that is only one bit of their business. Their role is almost like that of an outsourced CTO... they try to be the thought leader in the IT world. Their reports and such are very influential because they are delivered to the CEOs, CFOs and CIOs of large corporations. Gartner is very conservative, recommends only technologies precieved to be leading the marketplace and tends to not understand trends until they are obvious.
They do offer consulting services, and they are very pricey.
The Firefly series was just too out there for the average TV viewer... it would have done great if it had the same positioning as Farscape... It will do really well in theaters as a movie because it has the look and feel that will work. Can't wait to see it.
The trend is to pack more functionality into the firmware on computers. More isn't always better as bios based features can limit end user functionality. This is why DRM is such a sticky issue - it's an example of using firmware to limit capability. An open BIOS would be a great place to ensure that a computer has maximum potential for the user... without the limitations that come as you pack functionality into the BIOS.
I've been selling computers to large corps and the govt for about 10 years now. In the corporate world the objective is to improve productivity, reduce risk and control costs. So we use strategies like:
* platform standardization - it lowers costs, enhances security and reduces downtime at the cost of having the right computer for the job (just ask they guy in marketing how well illustrator runs on his celeron dell). * standardization of software - the reduces support costs and makes standardized training possible. This is at the cost of using the right tool for the job at hand. * Lock down security - once we know a job description, we restrict access massively.
It makes me want to scream when I see schools implement these strategies because they are in essence dumbing down the system. Yes, the school can save a little money, but having platform diversity is important: people need to know how to work with computers -- and you don't learn that by using a single platform. You also don't need total lockdown security - students need to learn how the systems really work... and if everything is totally locked down... you can't do that. That's one thing I love about unix like platforms - you can have a lot of security and still leave a lot of room to learn with the student.
Standardized software is my biggest gripe in schools. Software is a tool. Why restrict students to exploring just one tool? What's wrong with letting students use open office for a term paper - just submit in PDF... How about letting students do that slide set for their speech class with flash instead of powerpoint? Or why not let budding graphic designers try freehand vs. illustrator vs. corel.
I've been selling tablets for a while. They are very nice in that they are simply better engineered low power computers than most laptops. Battery life is better - and the handwriting recognition under Windows isn't bad. Software development, though is difficult because you have to build the application for pen. A killer app for a tablet would be a web browser hacked for direct pen input to web form text and textarea controls. No... opening the "pen input panel is not the right answer. This would requrie NO investment is software re-writes and would make the platform more useful....
I'm glad that they're allowing all folks the opportunity to enjoy flying.
Hopefully the industry responds by bringing a large number of affordable aircraft to market. It's really a tradegy that almost a century has passed since the first aircraft and the average person can't afford to own one. It's an enhancement to personal liberty.
As for safety, it should be up to the flyer to preserve his own life.
And also the flyer's responsibility to protect the lives and property of others on the air and ground. (kinda goes without saying)
if you cant afford to maintain that $150,000 Cessna in absolute top condition then you do not deserve to own it or fly it.
This is exactly the problem. Let's find a way to make aviation more affordable. Let's get a mass market moving that can support high quality/low cost aircraft and reduce maintenance costs. If cars were regulated the way aircraft are you'd still have a horse.
The FAA and aviation community has made access to aviation too costly for most people. The cost of mandated repairs/upgrades/maintenance and the cost of licensing really is prohibitive and limits the market for aircraft. A new class of less regulated, easier to maintain planes and easier to get licenses would go a long way towards ending this problem... Even a two seat puddle jumper with a 200 MPH speed and 600 mile range would be a huge improvement over the car.
It depends on the show.... Some of the shows are all about the business and are targeted at the real customers for games: software retailers and game distributors. These shows are fun and entertaining and business gets done.
The shows targeted at players generally are not useful because only the product marketing people are there and no real business gets done.
A mass scale patent attack would leave Bill's empire weakened. The vast number of their patents are of the FAT file system/screen pager variety which should be easily invalidated. The last thing MS needs is a large number of lost patent actions, followed by a reform of the patent system. MS is an innovator and not an inventor, and they will find out that patents are far more useful to inventors.
Dell = cut out two layers of cost/markup by eliminating the distributor and the reseller. Lower cost, lower price, better profits
IBM = make billions by providing complete hardware/software/network solutions. Hardware is bundled with and optimized for software and commands a higher selling price.
HP = Make money off of toner and ink and pray that someone doesn't come out with an inkjet with a one litre ink tank that is user refillable. Continue to find a way to sell computer hardware to sell more printers...
Let's assume for a minute that cycling doesn't have the 50 year history of doing everything within and outside the rules for maximum performance. Lance is a champion. Let's say that today's peloton is dirty. And so is Lance. He's still a champion.
After one or two more tour victories, no ammount of French press will be able to deny the obvious - Lance is the greatest of our time. Is he as great as Anqtiel and Merckx? Possibly - but because Armstrong does not ride the rest of the professional circuit, we can never really make that measure.
SNK's decision makes sense as their ROMS are being dumped way to quickly and it doesn't give them any time to make money from their real customer base (high end gamers and arcade machine operators). It's a good decision, but unless the new format is compatible with the old hardware, they may simply not make it.
I do wonder though, how many people download their roms and play via emulator who would simply never buy their games because of the cost.
Bait and Switch is governed by the FTC (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/baitads-gd.htm) If you are running a store and are reselling merchandise from out of state, you would be in violation of FTC regulations. It's not legit to advertise a $10 item and then to discourage it being purchased in any way.
Another tactic of offering a product at a sale price is to get the customer physically into the store where you may encourage them to select a different product
This is known as "Bait & Switch" and is highly illegal for large retailers like best buy. Yocal businesses may get away with this more often. Back in the late 80s Sears was nearly put out of business by the FTC for this practice. Foisting Bait & Switch scams on the public is the worst sort of customer service. Once you get that reputation, consumers avoid your store like the plague.
The purpose of sales in retail are simple:
* Sell more. In retail, the key metric is turns (the rate at which a particular products sells). Sales yeild turns often for products that don't sell well at higher prices.
* Traffic. Good deals get people in the store. If you get people in the store you will sell stuff that isn't necessarily a loss leader. You can actually predict sales based on traffic...
* Attached Sales - Warranties, accessories and other types of "fries" (as the original poster pointed out)
The original article makes me sick: if Best Buy further treats its customers like criminals, it will have a hard time getting traffic over their increasingly effective comptetitors like Fry's, Circuit City, Sears and even Lowes. Once a retailer starts calling some of their customers "bad" the attitude will spread like cancer - and I'm sure the shareholders of Best Buy don't want the yellow and blue shirts making decisions about who is a good and bad customer.
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In 1984 if a PC didn't have 256K it didn't sell. 512 and 640K + 384K EMS memory was the cadilac.
Eliminating world povery is also a matter of national security.
Our "War on Poverty" in the US has had little success eliminating poverty in our own backyard... that said, American poverty is very different than poverty in a third world nation. The amazing thing is the attitude that prevails:
* Free Trade costs the US jobs!
* Free Trade SUXORS for the third world (no it doesn't! you can't go from hunter/gatherer economy to $20K/year avg income overnight, free trade is fairly intollerant of corruption and graft, too)
* The family farm must be protected! (this is a code for "we must subsidize our farmers so food is produced here"
* My god, we are sending our best jobs to Mexico/India/Singapore/etc...
What people fail to grasp is that people outside of Europe and North America have the same needs that we do. When NAFTA drove jobs to Mexico, it started a 100 year cycle where the worker in Mexico is in higher demand, will gain escalating skills and ultimately will see wages ballance with the industrialized world. It's just so easy to forget that those poor people in _________ country are people no different than you and I - they just were not fortunate enough to be born where opportunity exist.
I do believe, though that the solution to poverty is not debt. Taking a nation and making it pay 30% of the gdp to service loans is a sure way to cause poverty.
Mandatory Black Boxes are clearly a violation of the constitutions prohibition on self-incrimination. Even if they were mandated... I would be surprised if they were admisable.
If my car had one the first thing i'd do is take it out and hook it up to 120V AC for 10 minutes.
After reading the article "cut costs" seems to be the theme... put an e-Machine in a cow print box... voila, your new gateway! Kind of reminds me of the first Toyota/Lexus models...
MS will not mess with the open source world because it opens a can of worms so deep that they will never get them back in the can:
- The open source community is very good at uncovering prior art.
- The community has a knack for knowing when technologies were invented, and this can dramatically alter the length of time a patent can be held.
- Messing with the Open Source community is bad marketing... look what is happening to SCO.
- MS benefits substantially by "innovating" off of open source products and protocols.
Oh well - guess it's pretty hard to write a fictional future piece without injecting bizzare humor into it.
Or ruining it with predictions that have nothing to do with what you are predicting. The whole article's irrelevant because in nine years the world will be underwater from rising sea levels due do global warming, then frozen solid by nuclear winter, and generally burnt to a crisp by unfiltered solar radiation from the ozone layer checking out.
Right? Right?
In this case, Left, Right? Or somewhere that isn't the center.
GNU is NOT Unix. GNU is NOT Unix.
It's all in a name. Why even write an article about when "GNU is NOT Unix" will become certified Unix. This is a lot like having, say anarchists revolt and form a tolitarian government. Next article please.
eBooks will languish so long as they are priced higher than paperback or hardcover. Why would you want to pay 2x what I'd pay for paperback for an eBook that requires all kinds of complicated keys / DRM that will royally screw up when you change computers in six months?
BTW - my favorite format for eBooks w/o picutres is ascii or ansi text... my favorite for those with graphical content is non-DRMd PDFs... Funky proprietary ebook formats are useless...
Gartner is in the business of selling "reports" and "studies".
Actually, that is only one bit of their business. Their role is almost like that of an outsourced CTO... they try to be the thought leader in the IT world. Their reports and such are very influential because they are delivered to the CEOs, CFOs and CIOs of large corporations. Gartner is very conservative, recommends only technologies precieved to be leading the marketplace and tends to not understand trends until they are obvious.
They do offer consulting services, and they are very pricey.
The Firefly series was just too out there for the average TV viewer... it would have done great if it had the same positioning as Farscape... It will do really well in theaters as a movie because it has the look and feel that will work. Can't wait to see it.
The trend is to pack more functionality into the firmware on computers. More isn't always better as bios based features can limit end user functionality. This is why DRM is such a sticky issue - it's an example of using firmware to limit capability. An open BIOS would be a great place to ensure that a computer has maximum potential for the user... without the limitations that come as you pack functionality into the BIOS.
I've been selling computers to large corps and the govt for about 10 years now. In the corporate world the objective is to improve productivity, reduce risk and control costs. So we use strategies like:
* platform standardization - it lowers costs, enhances security and reduces downtime at the cost of having the right computer for the job (just ask they guy in marketing how well illustrator runs on his celeron dell).
* standardization of software - the reduces support costs and makes standardized training possible. This is at the cost of using the right tool for the job at hand.
* Lock down security - once we know a job description, we restrict access massively.
It makes me want to scream when I see schools implement these strategies because they are in essence dumbing down the system. Yes, the school can save a little money, but having platform diversity is important: people need to know how to work with computers -- and you don't learn that by using a single platform. You also don't need total lockdown security - students need to learn how the systems really work... and if everything is totally locked down... you can't do that. That's one thing I love about unix like platforms - you can have a lot of security and still leave a lot of room to learn with the student.
Standardized software is my biggest gripe in schools. Software is a tool. Why restrict students to exploring just one tool? What's wrong with letting students use open office for a term paper - just submit in PDF... How about letting students do that slide set for their speech class with flash instead of powerpoint? Or why not let budding graphic designers try freehand vs. illustrator vs. corel.
I've been selling tablets for a while. They are very nice in that they are simply better engineered low power computers than most laptops. Battery life is better - and the handwriting recognition under Windows isn't bad. Software development, though is difficult because you have to build the application for pen. A killer app for a tablet would be a web browser hacked for direct pen input to web form text and textarea controls. No... opening the "pen input panel is not the right answer. This would requrie NO investment is software re-writes and would make the platform more useful....
I play the new Playboy game for it's intuitive game play and exciting plot twists...
I don't play it for the nude scenes... really...
I'm glad that they're allowing all folks the opportunity to enjoy flying.
Hopefully the industry responds by bringing a large number of affordable aircraft to market. It's really a tradegy that almost a century has passed since the first aircraft and the average person can't afford to own one. It's an enhancement to personal liberty.
As for safety, it should be up to the flyer to preserve his own life.
And also the flyer's responsibility to protect the lives and property of others on the air and ground. (kinda goes without saying)
if you cant afford to maintain that $150,000 Cessna in absolute top condition then you do not deserve to own it or fly it.
This is exactly the problem. Let's find a way to make aviation more affordable. Let's get a mass market moving that can support high quality/low cost aircraft and reduce maintenance costs. If cars were regulated the way aircraft are you'd still have a horse.
The FAA and aviation community has made access to aviation too costly for most people. The cost of mandated repairs/upgrades/maintenance and the cost of licensing really is prohibitive and limits the market for aircraft. A new class of less regulated, easier to maintain planes and easier to get licenses would go a long way towards ending this problem... Even a two seat puddle jumper with a 200 MPH speed and 600 mile range would be a huge improvement over the car.
It depends on the show.... Some of the shows are all about the business and are targeted at the real customers for games: software retailers and game distributors. These shows are fun and entertaining and business gets done.
The shows targeted at players generally are not useful because only the product marketing people are there and no real business gets done.
A mass scale patent attack would leave Bill's empire weakened. The vast number of their patents are of the FAT file system/screen pager variety which should be easily invalidated. The last thing MS needs is a large number of lost patent actions, followed by a reform of the patent system. MS is an innovator and not an inventor, and they will find out that patents are far more useful to inventors.
Dell = cut out two layers of cost/markup by eliminating the distributor and the reseller. Lower cost, lower price, better profits
IBM = make billions by providing complete hardware/software/network solutions. Hardware is bundled with and optimized for software and commands a higher selling price.
HP = Make money off of toner and ink and pray that someone doesn't come out with an inkjet with a one litre ink tank that is user refillable. Continue to find a way to sell computer hardware to sell more printers...
Let's assume for a minute that cycling doesn't have the 50 year history of doing everything within and outside the rules for maximum performance. Lance is a champion. Let's say that today's peloton is dirty. And so is Lance. He's still a champion.
After one or two more tour victories, no ammount of French press will be able to deny the obvious - Lance is the greatest of our time. Is he as great as Anqtiel and Merckx? Possibly - but because Armstrong does not ride the rest of the professional circuit, we can never really make that measure.
SNK's decision makes sense as their ROMS are being dumped way to quickly and it doesn't give them any time to make money from their real customer base (high end gamers and arcade machine operators). It's a good decision, but unless the new format is compatible with the old hardware, they may simply not make it.
I do wonder though, how many people download their roms and play via emulator who would simply never buy their games because of the cost.
Bait and Switch is governed by the FTC (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/baitads-gd.htm) If you are running a store and are reselling merchandise from out of state, you would be in violation of FTC regulations. It's not legit to advertise a $10 item and then to discourage it being purchased in any way.
What the BBB says is one thing. What the FTC says is quite another. See http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/baitads-gd.htm for the facts on this.
Another tactic of offering a product at a sale price is to get the customer physically into the store where you may encourage them to select a different product
This is known as "Bait & Switch" and is highly illegal for large retailers like best buy. Yocal businesses may get away with this more often. Back in the late 80s Sears was nearly put out of business by the FTC for this practice. Foisting Bait & Switch scams on the public is the worst sort of customer service. Once you get that reputation, consumers avoid your store like the plague.
The purpose of sales in retail are simple:
* Sell more. In retail, the key metric is turns (the rate at which a particular products sells). Sales yeild turns often for products that don't sell well at higher prices.
* Traffic. Good deals get people in the store. If you get people in the store you will sell stuff that isn't necessarily a loss leader. You can actually predict sales based on traffic...
* Attached Sales - Warranties, accessories and other types of "fries" (as the original poster pointed out)
The original article makes me sick: if Best Buy further treats its customers like criminals, it will have a hard time getting traffic over their increasingly effective comptetitors like Fry's, Circuit City, Sears and even Lowes. Once a retailer starts calling some of their customers "bad" the attitude will spread like cancer - and I'm sure the shareholders of Best Buy don't want the yellow and blue shirts making decisions about who is a good and bad customer.