I'm surprised at the knee-jerk alarm about this merger. Do you people really think that this is going to lead to monopoly?
Hardly. For one thing, there are still a ton of telecom providers out there... it'll be Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest, and two dozen smaller regional carriers. All these mergers have accomplished is the undoing of the ill-considered 1986 telecom act, which said you couldn't do both long-distance and local telephony. Now the big guys do both.
But more importantly, there's more competition than ever before in the industry because of emerging technologies and the net. Voice over IP providers --including pure-play guys like Vonage, as well as all the cable companies-- are starting to compete with the phone companies. So AT&T and Verizon are going to have to stay competitively priced in order to keep from losing customers to those services.
And have you ever heard of cell phones? The wireline carriers can't crank up costs, because they're already losing people to their mobiles.
Not that it matters, but I'm a liberal and usually object to any conglomeration of corporate power. But it's silly to instantly panic at any sort of merger and assume it's a nightmare.
All these companies are doing is trying to stay alive in the face of killer new technology. The only people screwed here are the carriers themselves.
I've read a number of books lately suggesting that beef is A) horribly contaminated with fecal matter and e-coli bacteria (see Fast Food Nation) or B) full of deadly prions that cause mad cow disease and could be leading us to a massive global health crisis (see Deadly Feasts).
While I'd never bought any of the arguments for vegetarianism before, and I have a hard time imagining giving up red meat, both of these books are written by respected journalists (one a pulitzer prize winner) and both make beef seem scary as hell.
Have you analyzed the controversy over the safety of beef at all, and what's your take? Are you worried about e-coli or mad cow? Should we be?
Steve addressed this in his remarks, saying they expect the superdrive model to have the highest level of demand.
At first, this made me hesitate- it sounds like just marketing, coming up with a reason for your poor planning in production. But the more I think about it, I think the superdrive -and the consequent ability to burn DVDs- is going to be one of the biggest selling points of this computer. Everything is coming together to make this iMac huge -cheap DVD players, digital still and video cameras finally becoming commonplace- and I think the iMac's role is going to be as a video-editing station for the masses. The original iMac had great success because it was a cheap, all in one internet machine. I think Apple has really nailed what the next digital zeitgeist's going to be.
Of course, knowing apple, they probably screwed up the production anyway.
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I'm surprised at the knee-jerk alarm about this merger. Do you people really think that this is going to lead to monopoly?
Hardly. For one thing, there are still a ton of telecom providers out there... it'll be Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest, and two dozen smaller regional carriers. All these mergers have accomplished is the undoing of the ill-considered 1986 telecom act, which said you couldn't do both long-distance and local telephony. Now the big guys do both.
But more importantly, there's more competition than ever before in the industry because of emerging technologies and the net. Voice over IP providers --including pure-play guys like Vonage, as well as all the cable companies-- are starting to compete with the phone companies. So AT&T and Verizon are going to have to stay competitively priced in order to keep from losing customers to those services.
And have you ever heard of cell phones? The wireline carriers can't crank up costs, because they're already losing people to their mobiles.
Not that it matters, but I'm a liberal and usually object to any conglomeration of corporate power. But it's silly to instantly panic at any sort of merger and assume it's a nightmare.
All these companies are doing is trying to stay alive in the face of killer new technology. The only people screwed here are the carriers themselves.
While I'd never bought any of the arguments for vegetarianism before, and I have a hard time imagining giving up red meat, both of these books are written by respected journalists (one a pulitzer prize winner) and both make beef seem scary as hell. Have you analyzed the controversy over the safety of beef at all, and what's your take? Are you worried about e-coli or mad cow? Should we be?
All those white folks, they've gotta be Mormons.
Steve addressed this in his remarks, saying they expect the superdrive model to have the highest level of demand.
At first, this made me hesitate- it sounds like just marketing, coming up with a reason for your poor planning in production. But the more I think about it, I think the superdrive -and the consequent ability to burn DVDs- is going to be one of the biggest selling points of this computer. Everything is coming together to make this iMac huge -cheap DVD players, digital still and video cameras finally becoming commonplace- and I think the iMac's role is going to be as a video-editing station for the masses. The original iMac had great success because it was a cheap, all in one internet machine. I think Apple has really nailed what the next digital zeitgeist's going to be.
Of course, knowing apple, they probably screwed up the production anyway.