Apple is worth more than IBM, but armchair CEOs keep saying, "if they were smart, they would sell OS X for 'IBM' PCs. Imagine how much more successful they would be." But Apple has no debt, it has billions in the bank, and its cashflow is astounding and steeply increasing. Why do the armchair CEOs never do a reality check and adjust to what really works in the marketplace? Quality products that are cool and just work.
Before doing anything, google xyz.com to see if it is active. Doing searches that ping the site, or that go through a registrar, or that alert anyone at all to interest in xyz.com can be a costly mistake. (I learned this lesson after seeing domains snatched after searches through reputable registrars.)
My 500 MHz G3 with 340 MB of RAM can run those apps simultaneously under OS X 10.4. As another example, I have no problem running Quark, Dreamweaver and Photoshop together. Imagine trying to run Vista on a Pentium III. OS X is robust on my G3.
SAT prep books are great for reviewing basic math concepts, especially ratio and percentage problems, which come up in everyday life. (The kind of algebra that can help you spend money wisely.) The SAT will also give you an idea of what is considered fluency with math at the high school level.
Here's a roundup of Wimax products featured at Wimax World, where the Sprint demo took place. Scarcity of Wimax products will not be a problem.
I've been intrigued by Eric Schmidt's comment at the keynote introduction of the iPhone. "Wimax is coming," he said, without elaborating. Googling that phrase shows that almost no journalists have considered it an important remark, even though in the next breath he coined the term "applegoog" to describe how closely Google would be collaborating with Apple. "To merge without merging," as he put it. Later, Google announced its 700MHz interests, announced a collaboration with Sprint, which has announced its partnership with Clearwire (the two big Wimax telcos) and journalists still aren't paying attention.
So, yeah, Wimax could become the next munifi. It could also turn into serious headaches for AT&T, Verizon, and any company without a Wimax investment.
I installed Ubuntu on a computer I found at the local landfill, thrilled that it had a wireless card until discovering that ndiswrapper would be necessary to get it online. (No ethernet card.) It took hours to find all the necessary ingredients and instructions. They're all in different places. Why can't they be in just one place, with scripts to install everything automatically? Even if there are hundreds of cards, requiring more-than-hundreds of install packages, it would save millions of hours of frustration for linux newbies.
Ndiswrapper works very well, once it's set up. Kudos to the team for their efforts.
It only runs in Mac Classic, but at 400k, the web browser Wannabe is a very cool app. Extremely fast at loading pages. It displays only text, converting images (ads, etc.) to urls or saving them to disk. I really wish the author would open-source it for a port to OS X and other systems.
This think tank is definitely in the business of bias. Here's one that concluded tax cuts would not primarily benefit the rich, but Congress didn't buy it. Here's one cited in Forbes saying that insurance deficiencies are due to government regulation--which Michael Moore's "Sicko" exposes as a horrible untruth. It's easy to find studies like this from IPI. They use Free Market rhetoric to influence lawmakers, but it's that variety of the Free Market that is anticompetitive.
The music industry, as everyone here likes to say, relies on an outdated business model, but one part of their business model that is quite current and up to date is how it seeks protection through government influence. Sometimes Congress likes to hear distorted studies, because it helps them to have excuses. That's the real issue here.
I always think of Brazil, the Terry Gilliam movie. One cosmetic-surgery patient favors a doctor who is completely ineffectual. The woman he treats looks older and older and older, but the doctor is adamant that only his treatment will work, and even sounds authoritative, despite his utter failure to deliver. Another woman favors a doctor who makes her look younger and younger and younger. The ineffectual doctor thinks he's on equal footing with the guy whose treatment actually works, and keeps demanding respect and attention and obeisance. He is the equivalent of Monty Python's Black Knight, From The Holy Grail movie, missing all his arms and legs, who calls to the knight who has just pathetically vanquished him, "Come back and fight, you chicken!"
Microsoft is that way. Like the doctor in Brazil who keeps saying he has the cure, the treatment. Like the Black Knight that has been utterly defeated, who still thinks he's invincible.
But the truth is that Microsoft has peaked and it's all downhill from here. I am preaching to the choir. Hope you all enjoy the similes, because they are... oddly on target, aren't they?
Because, look, no trojans or viruses on OS X? How long can anyone keep that secret? Free, as in beer, with Linux? While old veryveryfast but not thefastest computers are obsolescenced by Moore'e Law?
The TIME for Microsoft has passed, and everyone knows it, except the lawyers. The truth is, the lawyers are even squirming. They are never ones to be in it for the long haul. That's why they have hourly rates.
Vista. Total, utter failure! No backtalk, now! This is really happening, Microsoft has lost its way and the wolves are at the door.
The SCO case would have been under everyone's radar if not for the amazing work of PJ and contributors to groklaw, who no doubt also encouraged the defense team. The outcome was obvious from the beginning, though. SCO knew that, and that's what's worrisome. The end result of this pitiful case is that a lot of anti-FOSS attorneys have learned how to assess "the cost of doing business," a la Microsoft and its antitrust skirmishes, so the victory is not what it seems. The really serious minds like PJ and the fab folks at groklaw know that already, too, so this victory counts more as a call to action--an example of how action works--than a legal victory.
The SCO case launched in 2003. In Moore's-law-years, that's three generations of CPUs. It's a Google IPO, an Apple shift to Intel, assorted consolidations of telcos and other big-board-game inscrutability. What's happened with Open Source? Firefox numbers increasing. Software patents getting a re-examination. (Cory Doctorow announcing a switch to Ubuntu? Uhsowhat.) But what's really changed? br?
I hope that the programmers who write code know that they are doing all the work. They're the heroes. With the attention going to big-name brouhahas and guys with easy money, it's gotta be said that the lonesome hacker is the real world-changer.
Check out how much TV spectrum goes unused across the U.S., and not just in rural areas. Unbelievable waste. Does this look like a free-market allocation of resources? Does the FCC realize it is making earnest citizens literally sick with disappointment? How many people would welcome a movement to just seize the airwaves, creating wireless ISPs that don't ask for permission to broadcast? Bring on the interference?
Is there competition in the insurance industry? If they're all using the same actuarial tables (and it's likely they are, since the info is so easy to get and correlate nowadays), then how can rates differ by substantial margins? The question to ask in this context is if those extra charges mentioned in the article are commensurate with actuarial risk, which would be fair, or if they're based on a ruse that will fly under the radar of regulators, if regulation even exists. Maybe that's a facade too. The Michael Moore film, Sicko, makes me wonder if there is any legitimacy to the insurance industry. They should be as tightly controlled as a state lottery.
I recall very detailed plans in Byte Magazine in the 80s for building parallel processing boards. Anyone investigating prior art (under our new patent laws) ought to check out the November 1988 issue. This site lists tables of contents of all the old Bytes Can't remember if the processors shared memory though.
Google is putting up money, but its proposal to the FCC is backed by Intel, Yahoo!, eBay, Skype, DirecTV, EchoStar, and Access Spectrum (which constitute The Coalition for 4G in America), but there are many other groups also in favor of open access. See this write-up on Daily Wireless for a good overview, and read Google's own explanation on its Public Policy Blog.
I wish Slashdot paid more attention to wireless goings-on. For instance, just this week, Sprint announced it is forming a 20 year alliance with Clearwire. The two companies are rolling out WiMax phone and broadband services, and together spent billions to control spectrum that reaches nearly everyone in the U.S. Wouldn't it be nice if they had to lower their price to consumers because of open-access competition in the 700mhz band?
I live in a rural place that is lucky to have one broadband provider, a cable company. (Nope, no DSL.) If open access succeeds, small wireless ISPs will sprout up in places like this, which big companies always seem to neglect. Those ISPs would be paying wholesale prices for their spectrum, too, so regional monopolies like my cable company will finally face some pressure to lower their prices, or else to compete on speed and service.
Here is a PDF of the ruling issued by SCOTUS. The essence is that "retail price maintenance" can have a procompetitive effect, in that it fosters interbrand competition while reducing intrabrand competition. For example, Bose Stereo competes with other brands, and sellers of Bose equipment know they won't be undersold by a different price-cutting franchise. This procompetitive effect was ruled to outweigh the dangers of anticompetitive price-fixing of the sort done by cartels and monopolies.
Both cases mentioned in TFA do point to likely collusion between the wholesale buyer and the auction reseller. It looks as if the wholesalers have indeed tried to circumvent their agreements to maintain fixed retail prices. Nothing to be alarmed about here.
People here keep mentioning the cost of broadband, so here's a recent chart comparing costs worldwide. (Example: 34 cents/Mbps in South Korea versus $10/Mbps in the U.S., if it's even available where you live, which is why Open Access really matters.)
I relate the FCC's position to all the news about Dick Cheney a few weeks ago, how he relentlessly pressures political appointees who ought to be impartial. Could it be happening again?
The technique can send signals 2000 km over fiber without the need for transponders (repeaters) between sender and receiver. Now Google, for example, can create an alternate backbone from all that dark fiber it's been buying up, with near-zero maintenance costs.
The dichotomy guy is basically right, you know, except that the world isn't elegantly Freudian that way, with a neat synthetic ego bent on balance to give an intelligible narrative. It's a machine capable of lying, and much worse, able to outrun any contretemps except craziness more irrational than itself. Both of them are built on a syntax like latin or german, with regular irregularity, but diverging in opposite directions at that particular juncture, neither of them particularly sane. The thing to remember about neat and tidy explanations is that they don't model the inexplicable by design. So, anyhow, whatever constitutes Power is suspect. Maybe it's academic cred. Maybe else. Maybe the drunken boat is an alphabet of colors nobody can see. It still matters who tells the truth, with the why of it a secondary consideration. But I am indulging the digressive impulse here, because/. is blind to all but wan vanes atilting.
The author quotes Thomas Pynchon, who in 1984 published a much more interesting piece on technology in the New York Times. Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?"
But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible.
Rick Cotton is not talking to pirates, but to the Justice Department. He is saying, "Enforce the law. Devote more resources to it." That's why the U.S. Attorney General wants to make it a crime to even attempt copyright infringement, because it would reduce the cost of criminal prosecution to a manageable level. P2P and bittorrent publicize the downloader's IP address, after all.
The media companies have a trump card--election campaigns can go a whole lot more smoothly with their endorsement. It's trivially easy for them to inject their own bias into a campaign, to besmirch a candidate either overtly or subtly. The Justice Department is no longer politically neutral (if it has ever been), but does the bidding of political parties. Want to stay in office? Want your candidates to get favorable treatment in the media? Then just do us this little favor, enforce the copyright laws with more of the tax dollars "we" pay you.
Media bias has a profound effect on the masses. Nobody is immune. The real issue isn't copyright freedom, but who gets elected.
Counterexample: Ani DiFranco and her own label, Righteous Babe Records. She's been mentioned on Slashdot many times before in the context of labels exploiting artists.
Labels try to dictate what artists can do, what their music should sound like--not to make the music "better" but to conform to what already sells. They keep about 90% of revenues. Artists receive royalties only AFTER paying the label for the costs of studio time, so break-even is about half a million units sold.
Ani DiFranco is in the black after selling a few hundred albums, if not immediately. Quite a difference.
Any of you posters who dismiss and disparage the iPhone's chances of success would still be impressed if one of your friends had one. You'd think he/she had something going on, maybe that they were affluent and stylish, maybe that they were lucky to be able to play with one, maybe that it reflected badly on your own utilitarian tastes, home-built computers, t-shirt wardrobes, and dorm-room outlook on life.
If you don't wear the likes of Armani and Rolex and think you never will, or if your car is generic and that's good enough for you, and if your diet consists of a lot of fast food, and if you are basically an ordinary person, then the concept of a luxury item may be something you don't truly understand. You might think of it as a needless or ostentatious ploy to gain status, whereas in reality a good segment of the population considers such things to be affordable and desirable on merit alone.
"It costs too much" says a lot about priorities. The fact is, the iPhone is a great piece of technology, and if they were free, everyone would want one. (But some people would complain about any price.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is worth more than IBM, but armchair CEOs keep saying, "if they were smart, they would sell OS X for 'IBM' PCs. Imagine how much more successful they would be." But Apple has no debt, it has billions in the bank, and its cashflow is astounding and steeply increasing. Why do the armchair CEOs never do a reality check and adjust to what really works in the marketplace? Quality products that are cool and just work.
Before doing anything, google xyz.com to see if it is active. Doing searches that ping the site, or that go through a registrar, or that alert anyone at all to interest in xyz.com can be a costly mistake. (I learned this lesson after seeing domains snatched after searches through reputable registrars.)
My 500 MHz G3 with 340 MB of RAM can run those apps simultaneously under OS X 10.4. As another example, I have no problem running Quark, Dreamweaver and Photoshop together. Imagine trying to run Vista on a Pentium III. OS X is robust on my G3.
SAT prep books are great for reviewing basic math concepts, especially ratio and percentage problems, which come up in everyday life. (The kind of algebra that can help you spend money wisely.) The SAT will also give you an idea of what is considered fluency with math at the high school level.
Here's a roundup of Wimax products featured at Wimax World, where the Sprint demo took place. Scarcity of Wimax products will not be a problem.
I've been intrigued by Eric Schmidt's comment at the keynote introduction of the iPhone. "Wimax is coming," he said, without elaborating. Googling that phrase shows that almost no journalists have considered it an important remark, even though in the next breath he coined the term "applegoog" to describe how closely Google would be collaborating with Apple. "To merge without merging," as he put it. Later, Google announced its 700MHz interests, announced a collaboration with Sprint, which has announced its partnership with Clearwire (the two big Wimax telcos) and journalists still aren't paying attention.
So, yeah, Wimax could become the next munifi. It could also turn into serious headaches for AT&T, Verizon, and any company without a Wimax investment.
Mod +6 please.
I installed Ubuntu on a computer I found at the local landfill, thrilled that it had a wireless card until discovering that ndiswrapper would be necessary to get it online. (No ethernet card.) It took hours to find all the necessary ingredients and instructions. They're all in different places. Why can't they be in just one place, with scripts to install everything automatically? Even if there are hundreds of cards, requiring more-than-hundreds of install packages, it would save millions of hours of frustration for linux newbies.
Ndiswrapper works very well, once it's set up. Kudos to the team for their efforts.
It only runs in Mac Classic, but at 400k, the web browser Wannabe is a very cool app. Extremely fast at loading pages. It displays only text, converting images (ads, etc.) to urls or saving them to disk. I really wish the author would open-source it for a port to OS X and other systems.
This think tank is definitely in the business of bias. Here's one that concluded tax cuts would not primarily benefit the rich, but Congress didn't buy it. Here's one cited in Forbes saying that insurance deficiencies are due to government regulation--which Michael Moore's "Sicko" exposes as a horrible untruth. It's easy to find studies like this from IPI. They use Free Market rhetoric to influence lawmakers, but it's that variety of the Free Market that is anticompetitive.
The music industry, as everyone here likes to say, relies on an outdated business model, but one part of their business model that is quite current and up to date is how it seeks protection through government influence. Sometimes Congress likes to hear distorted studies, because it helps them to have excuses. That's the real issue here.
I always think of Brazil, the Terry Gilliam movie. One cosmetic-surgery patient favors a doctor who is completely ineffectual. The woman he treats looks older and older and older, but the doctor is adamant that only his treatment will work, and even sounds authoritative, despite his utter failure to deliver. Another woman favors a doctor who makes her look younger and younger and younger. The ineffectual doctor thinks he's on equal footing with the guy whose treatment actually works, and keeps demanding respect and attention and obeisance. He is the equivalent of Monty Python's Black Knight, From The Holy Grail movie, missing all his arms and legs, who calls to the knight who has just pathetically vanquished him, "Come back and fight, you chicken!"
Microsoft is that way. Like the doctor in Brazil who keeps saying he has the cure, the treatment. Like the Black Knight that has been utterly defeated, who still thinks he's invincible.
But the truth is that Microsoft has peaked and it's all downhill from here. I am preaching to the choir. Hope you all enjoy the similes, because they are... oddly on target, aren't they?
Because, look, no trojans or viruses on OS X? How long can anyone keep that secret? Free, as in beer, with Linux? While old veryveryfast but not thefastest computers are obsolescenced by Moore'e Law?
The TIME for Microsoft has passed, and everyone knows it, except the lawyers. The truth is, the lawyers are even squirming. They are never ones to be in it for the long haul. That's why they have hourly rates.
Vista. Total, utter failure! No backtalk, now! This is really happening, Microsoft has lost its way and the wolves are at the door.
The SCO case would have been under everyone's radar if not for the amazing work of PJ and contributors to groklaw, who no doubt also encouraged the defense team. The outcome was obvious from the beginning, though. SCO knew that, and that's what's worrisome. The end result of this pitiful case is that a lot of anti-FOSS attorneys have learned how to assess "the cost of doing business," a la Microsoft and its antitrust skirmishes, so the victory is not what it seems. The really serious minds like PJ and the fab folks at groklaw know that already, too, so this victory counts more as a call to action--an example of how action works--than a legal victory.
The SCO case launched in 2003. In Moore's-law-years, that's three generations of CPUs. It's a Google IPO, an Apple shift to Intel, assorted consolidations of telcos and other big-board-game inscrutability. What's happened with Open Source? Firefox numbers increasing. Software patents getting a re-examination. (Cory Doctorow announcing a switch to Ubuntu? Uhsowhat.) But what's really changed?
br? I hope that the programmers who write code know that they are doing all the work. They're the heroes. With the attention going to big-name brouhahas and guys with easy money, it's gotta be said that the lonesome hacker is the real world-changer.
Check out how much TV spectrum goes unused across the U.S., and not just in rural areas. Unbelievable waste. Does this look like a free-market allocation of resources? Does the FCC realize it is making earnest citizens literally sick with disappointment? How many people would welcome a movement to just seize the airwaves, creating wireless ISPs that don't ask for permission to broadcast? Bring on the interference?
Is there competition in the insurance industry? If they're all using the same actuarial tables (and it's likely they are, since the info is so easy to get and correlate nowadays), then how can rates differ by substantial margins? The question to ask in this context is if those extra charges mentioned in the article are commensurate with actuarial risk, which would be fair, or if they're based on a ruse that will fly under the radar of regulators, if regulation even exists. Maybe that's a facade too. The Michael Moore film, Sicko, makes me wonder if there is any legitimacy to the insurance industry. They should be as tightly controlled as a state lottery.
Here's a recent chart of broadband speeds and costs around the world.
I recall very detailed plans in Byte Magazine in the 80s for building parallel processing boards. Anyone investigating prior art (under our new patent laws) ought to check out the November 1988 issue. This site lists tables of contents of all the old Bytes Can't remember if the processors shared memory though.
Google is putting up money, but its proposal to the FCC is backed by Intel, Yahoo!, eBay, Skype, DirecTV, EchoStar, and Access Spectrum (which constitute The Coalition for 4G in America), but there are many other groups also in favor of open access. See this write-up on Daily Wireless for a good overview, and read Google's own explanation on its Public Policy Blog.
I wish Slashdot paid more attention to wireless goings-on. For instance, just this week, Sprint announced it is forming a 20 year alliance with Clearwire. The two companies are rolling out WiMax phone and broadband services, and together spent billions to control spectrum that reaches nearly everyone in the U.S. Wouldn't it be nice if they had to lower their price to consumers because of open-access competition in the 700mhz band?
Robert X. Cringely's latest article is a good read, too. "When Elephants Dance: Get ready (finally) for faster Internet speeds at lower prices"
I live in a rural place that is lucky to have one broadband provider, a cable company. (Nope, no DSL.) If open access succeeds, small wireless ISPs will sprout up in places like this, which big companies always seem to neglect. Those ISPs would be paying wholesale prices for their spectrum, too, so regional monopolies like my cable company will finally face some pressure to lower their prices, or else to compete on speed and service.
Here is a PDF of the ruling issued by SCOTUS. The essence is that "retail price maintenance" can have a procompetitive effect, in that it fosters interbrand competition while reducing intrabrand competition. For example, Bose Stereo competes with other brands, and sellers of Bose equipment know they won't be undersold by a different price-cutting franchise. This procompetitive effect was ruled to outweigh the dangers of anticompetitive price-fixing of the sort done by cartels and monopolies.
Both cases mentioned in TFA do point to likely collusion between the wholesale buyer and the auction reseller. It looks as if the wholesalers have indeed tried to circumvent their agreements to maintain fixed retail prices. Nothing to be alarmed about here.
Google states its position very clearly in its Public Policy Blog.
People here keep mentioning the cost of broadband, so here's a recent chart comparing costs worldwide. (Example: 34 cents/Mbps in South Korea versus $10/Mbps in the U.S., if it's even available where you live, which is why Open Access really matters.)
I relate the FCC's position to all the news about Dick Cheney a few weeks ago, how he relentlessly pressures political appointees who ought to be impartial. Could it be happening again?
The technique can send signals 2000 km over fiber without the need for transponders (repeaters) between sender and receiver. Now Google, for example, can create an alternate backbone from all that dark fiber it's been buying up, with near-zero maintenance costs.
Here's a diagram of the test network.
The dichotomy guy is basically right, you know, except that the world isn't elegantly Freudian that way, with a neat synthetic ego bent on balance to give an intelligible narrative. It's a machine capable of lying, and much worse, able to outrun any contretemps except craziness more irrational than itself. Both of them are built on a syntax like latin or german, with regular irregularity, but diverging in opposite directions at that particular juncture, neither of them particularly sane. The thing to remember about neat and tidy explanations is that they don't model the inexplicable by design. So, anyhow, whatever constitutes Power is suspect. Maybe it's academic cred. Maybe else. Maybe the drunken boat is an alphabet of colors nobody can see. It still matters who tells the truth, with the why of it a secondary consideration. But I am indulging the digressive impulse here, because /. is blind to all but wan vanes atilting.
Rick Cotton is not talking to pirates, but to the Justice Department. He is saying, "Enforce the law. Devote more resources to it." That's why the U.S. Attorney General wants to make it a crime to even attempt copyright infringement, because it would reduce the cost of criminal prosecution to a manageable level. P2P and bittorrent publicize the downloader's IP address, after all.
The media companies have a trump card--election campaigns can go a whole lot more smoothly with their endorsement. It's trivially easy for them to inject their own bias into a campaign, to besmirch a candidate either overtly or subtly. The Justice Department is no longer politically neutral (if it has ever been), but does the bidding of political parties. Want to stay in office? Want your candidates to get favorable treatment in the media? Then just do us this little favor, enforce the copyright laws with more of the tax dollars "we" pay you.
Media bias has a profound effect on the masses. Nobody is immune. The real issue isn't copyright freedom, but who gets elected.
Counterexample: Ani DiFranco and her own label, Righteous Babe Records. She's been mentioned on Slashdot many times before in the context of labels exploiting artists.
Labels try to dictate what artists can do, what their music should sound like--not to make the music "better" but to conform to what already sells. They keep about 90% of revenues. Artists receive royalties only AFTER paying the label for the costs of studio time, so break-even is about half a million units sold.
Ani DiFranco is in the black after selling a few hundred albums, if not immediately. Quite a difference.
Any of you posters who dismiss and disparage the iPhone's chances of success would still be impressed if one of your friends had one. You'd think he/she had something going on, maybe that they were affluent and stylish, maybe that they were lucky to be able to play with one, maybe that it reflected badly on your own utilitarian tastes, home-built computers, t-shirt wardrobes, and dorm-room outlook on life.
If you don't wear the likes of Armani and Rolex and think you never will, or if your car is generic and that's good enough for you, and if your diet consists of a lot of fast food, and if you are basically an ordinary person, then the concept of a luxury item may be something you don't truly understand. You might think of it as a needless or ostentatious ploy to gain status, whereas in reality a good segment of the population considers such things to be affordable and desirable on merit alone.
"It costs too much" says a lot about priorities. The fact is, the iPhone is a great piece of technology, and if they were free, everyone would want one. (But some people would complain about any price.)
TFA says the production costs would be about $1 per pound of hydrogen. BTUs in one pound of hydrogen: 61,000. BTUs in one pound of gasoline: 20,500.