I have to agree, 2 of them pushing into MY house uninvited would have disappeared without a trace...
One _tries_ to give most people the benefit of a doubt...
Besides, this wasn't a rural farm setting. And the point was to get them to leave, at the time. If they'd come back and forced a way in, that might have been another matter...
My (former) wife had previously been married to some a**hole Scientologist, and they tracked her up to Portland from LA and harrassed us. I wasn't confrontational, at first.
They sent obnoxious mail. I taped it to cinder blocks with "addressee unknown, please return" on their mail. The US PS was happy to charge them $20 or so to return those.
However, when two of them pushed into my my living room without my invitation, I excused myself for a moment and came back with a rifle, which I pointed at them, and I told them to leave my premises and never darken my door again.
Then we got phone calls. I shut that down by calling their office and carefully explaining to them that if I got any further harrassment from them I would personally shoot everyone in their f*cking cult, starting with the people in their downtown office and not stopping until I'd found and shot every f*cking Scientologist in the entire state!
That worked. And that's how Scientologists should be dealt with. It's the only "reasoning" they understand. Tar and feathers are gentle approbation, and very appropriate.
Who cares what unwanted bloat and pandering to Hollywood's RIAA/MPAA goons Microsoft plans for their next revenue-extraction cycle? Irrelevant, that's all. Microsoft built it's empire on "good enough" software, but now most people have hardware and software that's "good enough" for what they want to do with it, so they have no need to pay OEMs or Microsoft again. They who have lived by "good enough" are about to die by it. And good riddance to bad software. I'm buying LEAP Puts on Microsoft stock.
A study that documents the corporate backlash against Microsoft's overweening greed is here.
I find it quite astonishing you got moderated up so high for that comment; but this is Slashdot, after all.
As though I give a flying f*ck about moderation. If you'd bothered to check my user page, you'd have seen that I'm karma-capped at 50. (This sometimes drops a little after I can't forebear flaming some idiot who really needs it, for his/her own good. But a couple of days always seems to put me right back up there. Yet, that's a different rant....)
So, when was the first use of the term "piracy" to refer to "unauthorized copying?" Was it Chief Software Architect Bill in his famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists?" No? I'd bet you a lunch that it was first used by the recording industry shills - if not Valenti, then another of that ilk. But I'd guess it was Valenti - he's been around almost forever.
And... my high-school SAT score in English was 800, i.e., perfect. What was yours? Have you pulled down $1-10K _per page_ for professional writing? I have, and I continue to do so, consistently. Get out of my face about writing, kid. I've forgotten more about writing than you'll ever learn. Want to give me a hard time about writing? Pack a lunch.
Oh, and why that comment got moderated up... simply the case that a couple of people with moderator points happened to agree with me. Misusing the word "piracy" to label even illegal copying dilutes the meaning of that term (as others have noted). But real "piracy" involves killing people, taking their boats (or merchant ships, which also still happens), and I'll be damned before I'll accept the newspeak definition that Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com publish. It's inaccurate, and it's just plain f*cking wrong!
Personally, I'd like to see someone show the RIAA and MPAA some _real_ piracy. Maybe then they'd be a bit more careful about how they abuse language and customers.
The promise not to loose [sic] a message is of monumental importance... and the ability to run on almost all platforms under the sun is MQ's bread and butter (zOS to NT, SCO to MVS).
But couldn't Jabber do that too? I realize that the public Jabber servers (jabber.com, jabber.org) might be lossy, but an internal Jabber service might be very reliable, and might even talk to MQ-Series on mainframes (zSeries), Unix (pSeries), and Intel (eSeries) systems. Has anyone tried this? I'm not trolling here, as I'd really like to hear what's been tried and what's maybe possible.
GuyFromAccounting whinged: So "piracy" is an emotionally laden term but "fair use" isn?t?
Fair Use is an accepted legal term for limited quotation of copyrighted writings, personal backup of software and media content, and time/space shifting of same.
In the case of "Fair Use" the emotional connotation is orthogonal with the meaning and, well... fair. With "piracy" though, the emotional baggage is so far out of proportion with the act denoted (and the actual "harm" incurred) as to be simply ludicrous.
Does that make it a little clearer for you now under those green eyeshades?
Could Jabber replace IBM's MQ-Series?
on
Programming Jabber
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm serious. IBM spent a ton of money building MQ-Series, which is a hideously complex messaging protocol for inter-and-intra systems communications in and between mainframe subsystems/LPARs and Unix systems (AIX mostly, since this is IBM, after all).
MQ-Series really is complicated, maybe over-complicated, to the point that IBM and customers even have "MQ-Series Specialists" on staff.
I'm not flaming IBM here (h*ll, I used to work for them, and they're a great company to work with), but they do have an unfortunate tendency to build overly complex systems where simpler ones might be a lot easier to use.
"Real "piracy" is rape, pillage, and murder on the high seas or some remote godforsaken mountain pass or desert wadi."
Ah, somebody else who went to see RMS at the DNC the other day:)
I didn't, actually. But it doesn't surprise me that RMS thinks clearly about the abuse of language.
Microsoft attempts similar redefinitions of words like "innovation" (crush, buy and bury, steal, lock out any competition with proprietary "embrace and extend") and "trustworthy computing" (trust us, and only us, and don't reveal flaws or exploits or workarounds, because those all badly embarrass us). It's sickening, and what's worse is that unthinking people (most everyone) seem to fall for it! Makes me think: herd of sheep!
is the broad adoption of Jack Valenti's misnomer "piracy" to denote "unauthorized copying." It's an improper usage of an emotionally loaded word and it unfairly biases the audience, albeit in a subtle way, every time it's used, even by journalists and others in support of Fair Use. It's like the popular but WRONG equation of "hacker" with "cracker" - which is also gleefully promoted by all those authoritarian a**holes who would like nothing better than to enslave us all to the RIAA and MPAA.
Real "piracy" is rape, pillage, and murder on the high seas or some remote godforsaken mountain pass or desert wadi. It still happens in the seas around Indonesia and Malaysia, and in the Caribbean, and it still happens on land in places like Africa and continental Asia. To equate sampling a piece of music by MP3 prior to deciding to purchase it with "piracy" is all so over-the-top hysterical that it would be merely comical if it hadn't gotten widespread currency.
Jack Valenti and Hillary Rosen should have their mouths washed out with soap for hammering on this to the point that even their opponents adopted their skewed language.
Andrew Carnegie was once the richest man in the world, but he dedicated himself - not to extending his steel fortune into monopolies on construction, automobiles, and other durable goods made from steel - but to _public_ access to self-education, information, and knowledge. He literally gave away all of his considerable fortune for this vision.
He single-handedly funded the establishment of the public libraries all across the United States that have played a large part in the subsequent success of this country over the last century. He believed that improving the lot of his fellow citizens was his obligation, and an honor to achieve. Andrew Carnegie was a truly great man and US patriot.
Here is a brief appreciation. Use Google for more about this great man who funded the libraries that educated the citizens who built this country, defeated the Axis dictators of Europe and Asia in WWII, and stared down the totalitarian dictators in the Cold War. (By the way, the megalomaniac Bill Gates isn't fit to view his grave.)
But what does this mean for the Authors Guild and their sniveling about Amazon offering used books? Simply this: serious authors (those who aren't just in it for the money) should (and do) measure their success not by royalties, but by how many people read and appreciate their works. They should not care (and the good ones don't) how many people _buy_ their books, but rather, how many people _read_ their books. The wise authors know that if they write well, lots of people will read what they write, and more people over time will buy their new works. It's only marginal authors and (more likely) their publishers who are whingeing at Amazon about the selling of used books online. Trading, lending and borrowing, even giving away used books are all Good Things.
Now we just need to get the same standards applied for books codified for CDs and DVDs, that is, utterly defeat the RIAA and MPAA attempts at taking over the world.
...I'd appreciate someone pointing me to the background for this story...
OK, here's the story. The local police busted a meth lab and found how-to drug manuals in a trailer, along with receipts from the bookstore. But the receipts didn't name the purchaser of the books, so the local DA subpoenaed the bookstore's customer records. The bookstore fought the subpoena and won.
I don't recall where I saw it today, but there was an article focused on AOL/TW and how disappointing it is to its stockholders, especially all the former Time-Warner stockholders.
Basically, AOL/TW is now worth about one-third of what the two companies were worth prior to the merger. Expected "synergies" haven't been realized - AOL/TW's biggest advertiser is... AOL/TW. And AOL hasn't executed on acquiring or leveraging the millions of cable subscribers hooked to Time-Warner.
But the article did compliment Steve Case for having realized AOL stock was ridiculously over-valued... and spending it quickly, before reality set in.
AOL/TW's stock is about $26 now, way down from its high. The article quoted analysts saying that most of that value is Time-Warner (about $22), with AOL only worth about $2 per share.
Thats a honkin lot of revenue, and very little marginal cost. MS in making money hand over fist. That's what monopolies do, maximise the difference between marginal revenue and marginal cost. MS can keep cranking out licences and were [sic] stuck buying them.
The extent to which Microsoft escapes its current antitrust case with a slap-on-the-wrist penalty will likely be inversely proportional to the number of major corporate customers' defections from their new annual "software rental" product licensing schemes. I stand by my analysis.
We're _not_ stuck buying Microsoft's inferior OS and applications software - there are alternatives springing up all around us - and smart CIOs, CTOs, and even business PHBs _will_ migrate to them for competitive advantages. Microsoft's days are numbered, but we just don't know that number yet.
If you'd like to read the best independent analysis of Microsoft's financial fraud, go here.
Meanwhile, sell your Microsoft stock because its about as high as it's going to go on the way down.
Microsoft needs to make money to survive... and they are running out of ways to do so.
That's perceptive, but Microsoft (M$)is not a business (like IBM, say) that makes money and pays dividends to stockholders. M$ pays zero dividends but pays a substantial portion of employee compensation in the form of stock options (which it _doesn't_ expense against revenue but _does_ write off for tax purposes). M$'s employees exercise their stock options and take profits because the stock price is higher than the options' strike prices. This works because the market perceives that M$ will continue to expand and grow, thus its stock price remains high. Mutual funds and ordinary investors buy M$ stock from M$ insiders based upon an unrealistic belief in Microsoft's perpetual growth.
M$ is a very sophisticated pyramid scheme, but it is _just_ a pyramid scheme. They hide revenue and income in good quarters in order to prop up the numbers in poor quarters, thus creating the illusion of financial stability (and the SEC is investigating this). In prior years, M$ made nearly 10% of total revenues from selling Puts on its own stock (knowing that it could manage its numbers to keep the stock price high enough to make those Puts expire worthless or at least worth less than they were paid for them). In fact, M$ would have _lost_ money in all of the past several years if they'd had to expense their stock option grants to employees! That's why M$ is a pyramid scheme. Still with me?
M$ doesn't just need to make money to survive - they need to _grow_ to survive. Once their growth flattens for a few quarters, the big mutual funds will notice the lack of dividends and start selling their stock. Financial reform laws relative to employee stock option grants moving through the US Congress and likely to pass, post-Enron, will further depress M$ financial results. One of these quarters, M$ will have to pay off on all those Puts they sold, also cutting net income. The fall of Microsoft will be truly spectacular, although in slow motion like Enron, but much larger. Mutual funds, 401k plans, and individual investors who don't get out early will lose billions of dollars. Microsoft's current market capitalization - the total value of all stock outstanding - is over $325 billion; in contrast, IBM's market cap is only about $17.9 billion, but IBM annual revenues and profits are about 10 times Microsoft's. Begin to see the problem? This explains a lot about Microsoft's savage actions.
Expensive home-theater cables are really essential if you're going to get that full theater experience with faithful studio quality sound reproduction from 0-50Khz.
Besides, all those oxygen-free single-crystal silver mithric-clad super-insulated home-theater cables are keeping my former college ladyfriend happily in 12-cylinder BMW 750s.
His answer: "64-bit is SLOWER than 32-bit! With 64-bit there's DOUBLE the memory to go through, so it takes the program TWICE AS LONG to do anything!!!"
Well, he was partly sorta right. If your programmers misuse 64-bit data operands where 32-bit data would do just as well, the application is going to waste about half the memory cache space (at all levels), so it _will_ run much slower. 64-bit flat memory is useful, especially for large databases, but programmers still have to understand what they're doing (and what the compiler will do, how that will impact the processor, memory, etc.) or they can build programs that run slower than they did in 32-bits.
See the 64-bit computing faq that's up at AnandTech right now.
...there is a reasonable chance that Boeing has self-insured this satellite.
A great comfort to the 23,000+ people who are slated to get laid off by Boeing's commercial aircraft business this year, as a direct result of all the brain-dead Bush administration's "security" hysteria preventing the traveling public from... traveling.
Shortly thereafter there was a quiet surrender ceremony where IBM handed over the "Evil Empire" moniker to Microsoft.
ROFL! That's so funny because it's so incredibly true. IBM is quietly happy about this, and rightly so. Understandably, Microsoft isn't - but most of their employees probably don't even realize why they've become so widely hated in the computing industry, or why it's well deserved.
IBM reached it's peak as an IT monopoly in the late '80s, then barely survived the backlash in the early '90s. But IBM had kickass hardware and software (still big money-makers), networking (since sold to AT&T and Cisco), and services (faltering, but still viable). IBM is also a very large multinational company (~$70 Billion annual revenue). IBM survived, but it's still a screwy company (I know, as I've worked there).
Microsoft is a much smaller company (under $10 billion annual revenue), and doesn't have complementary lines of business (though they're trying, but not very successfully), so their fall will be faster and harder. The late '90s will be seen as the highwater mark for Microsoft's IT monopoly. Their crash will hurt the US stock market, at least mutual funds in Microsoft. They don't pay dividends, ever. It's a sub-$10 stock.
The essence of the story of OS/2 is this: IBM gave away the PC Operating System to Bill Gates (Microsoft), then tried to recapture the PC platform with MicroChannel (implicating OS/2), but that didn't work out, so IBM tried partnering with Microsoft, which also didn't work, then finally IBM tried to build a real PC OS on it's own (OS/2 V3 and V4), but mis-handled it all horribly, and by then it was too late - Microsoft already had preloads, the political fix was in with the Courts, and the rest is history but still unfolding. But Microsoft's days are numbered....
Yeah, I've still got an OS/2 partition on my system (Warp 4 at Fixpak 15, the last one). It works fine, but I use Linux (Mandrake 8.1) now and that works better. I did the 25+ floppy installs of OS/2, got it working well enough to use it as my normal desktop through several years, even kept it running Lotus Notes shared with Windows partitions on notebooks for work, but now I use Linux almost exclusively. Linux is better.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree, 2 of them pushing into MY house uninvited would have disappeared without a trace...
One _tries_ to give most people the benefit of a doubt...
Besides, this wasn't a rural farm setting. And the point was to get them to leave, at the time. If they'd come back and forced a way in, that might have been another matter...
does that really work? or are you just bs'n us hehe
It worked at the time. No sh*t.
~R
My (former) wife had previously been married to some a**hole Scientologist, and they tracked her up to Portland from LA and harrassed us. I wasn't confrontational, at first.
They sent obnoxious mail. I taped it to cinder blocks with "addressee unknown, please return" on their mail. The US PS was happy to charge them $20 or so to return those.
However, when two of them pushed into my my living room without my invitation, I excused myself for a moment and came back with a rifle, which I pointed at them, and I told them to leave my premises and never darken my door again.
Then we got phone calls. I shut that down by calling their office and carefully explaining to them that if I got any further harrassment from them I would personally shoot everyone in their f*cking cult, starting with the people in their downtown office and not stopping until I'd found and shot every f*cking Scientologist in the entire state!
That worked. And that's how Scientologists should be dealt with. It's the only "reasoning" they understand. Tar and feathers are gentle approbation, and very appropriate.
Who cares what unwanted bloat and pandering to Hollywood's RIAA/MPAA goons Microsoft plans for their next revenue-extraction cycle? Irrelevant, that's all. Microsoft built it's empire on "good enough" software, but now most people have hardware and software that's "good enough" for what they want to do with it, so they have no need to pay OEMs or Microsoft again. They who have lived by "good enough" are about to die by it. And good riddance to bad software. I'm buying LEAP Puts on Microsoft stock.
A study that documents the corporate backlash against Microsoft's overweening greed is here.
I find it quite astonishing you got moderated up so high for that comment; but this is Slashdot, after all.
As though I give a flying f*ck about moderation. If you'd bothered to check my user page, you'd have seen that I'm karma-capped at 50. (This sometimes drops a little after I can't forebear flaming some idiot who really needs it, for his/her own good. But a couple of days always seems to put me right back up there. Yet, that's a different rant....)
So, when was the first use of the term "piracy" to refer to "unauthorized copying?" Was it Chief Software Architect Bill in his famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists?" No? I'd bet you a lunch that it was first used by the recording industry shills - if not Valenti, then another of that ilk. But I'd guess it was Valenti - he's been around almost forever.
And... my high-school SAT score in English was 800, i.e., perfect. What was yours? Have you pulled down $1-10K _per page_ for professional writing? I have, and I continue to do so, consistently. Get out of my face about writing, kid. I've forgotten more about writing than you'll ever learn. Want to give me a hard time about writing? Pack a lunch.
Oh, and why that comment got moderated up... simply the case that a couple of people with moderator points happened to agree with me. Misusing the word "piracy" to label even illegal copying dilutes the meaning of that term (as others have noted). But real "piracy" involves killing people, taking their boats (or merchant ships, which also still happens), and I'll be damned before I'll accept the newspeak definition that Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com publish. It's inaccurate, and it's just plain f*cking wrong!
Personally, I'd like to see someone show the RIAA and MPAA some _real_ piracy. Maybe then they'd be a bit more careful about how they abuse language and customers.
Feel free to join our standards-jig mailing list (See our lists [jabber.org]) and participate, few views are always welcome.
ROFL... We'll assume you meant to say _new_ views, etc. (37337ist Open Source hackers!) Thanks for your kind invitation.
The promise not to loose [sic] a message is of monumental importance... and the ability to run on almost all platforms under the sun is MQ's bread and butter (zOS to NT, SCO to MVS).
But couldn't Jabber do that too? I realize that the public Jabber servers (jabber.com, jabber.org) might be lossy, but an internal Jabber service might be very reliable, and might even talk to MQ-Series on mainframes (zSeries), Unix (pSeries), and Intel (eSeries) systems. Has anyone tried this? I'm not trolling here, as I'd really like to hear what's been tried and what's maybe possible.
GuyFromAccounting whinged: So "piracy" is an emotionally laden term but "fair use" isn?t?
Fair Use is an accepted legal term for limited quotation of copyrighted writings, personal backup of software and media content, and time/space shifting of same.
In the case of "Fair Use" the emotional connotation is orthogonal with the meaning and, well... fair. With "piracy" though, the emotional baggage is so far out of proportion with the act denoted (and the actual "harm" incurred) as to be simply ludicrous.
Does that make it a little clearer for you now under those green eyeshades?
I'm serious. IBM spent a ton of money building MQ-Series, which is a hideously complex messaging protocol for inter-and-intra systems communications in and between mainframe subsystems/LPARs and Unix systems (AIX mostly, since this is IBM, after all).
MQ-Series really is complicated, maybe over-complicated, to the point that IBM and customers even have "MQ-Series Specialists" on staff.
I'm not flaming IBM here (h*ll, I used to work for them, and they're a great company to work with), but they do have an unfortunate tendency to build overly complex systems where simpler ones might be a lot easier to use.
"Real "piracy" is rape, pillage, and murder on the high seas or some remote godforsaken mountain pass or desert wadi."
:)
Ah, somebody else who went to see RMS at the DNC the other day
I didn't, actually. But it doesn't surprise me that RMS thinks clearly about the abuse of language.
Microsoft attempts similar redefinitions of words like "innovation" (crush, buy and bury, steal, lock out any competition with proprietary "embrace and extend") and "trustworthy computing" (trust us, and only us, and don't reveal flaws or exploits or workarounds, because those all badly embarrass us). It's sickening, and what's worse is that unthinking people (most everyone) seem to fall for it! Makes me think: herd of sheep!
is the broad adoption of Jack Valenti's misnomer "piracy" to denote "unauthorized copying." It's an improper usage of an emotionally loaded word and it unfairly biases the audience, albeit in a subtle way, every time it's used, even by journalists and others in support of Fair Use. It's like the popular but WRONG equation of "hacker" with "cracker" - which is also gleefully promoted by all those authoritarian a**holes who would like nothing better than to enslave us all to the RIAA and MPAA.
Real "piracy" is rape, pillage, and murder on the high seas or some remote godforsaken mountain pass or desert wadi. It still happens in the seas around Indonesia and Malaysia, and in the Caribbean, and it still happens on land in places like Africa and continental Asia. To equate sampling a piece of music by MP3 prior to deciding to purchase it with "piracy" is all so over-the-top hysterical that it would be merely comical if it hadn't gotten widespread currency.
Jack Valenti and Hillary Rosen should have their mouths washed out with soap for hammering on this to the point that even their opponents adopted their skewed language.
Andrew Carnegie was once the richest man in the world, but he dedicated himself - not to extending his steel fortune into monopolies on construction, automobiles, and other durable goods made from steel - but to _public_ access to self-education, information, and knowledge. He literally gave away all of his considerable fortune for this vision.
He single-handedly funded the establishment of the public libraries all across the United States that have played a large part in the subsequent success of this country over the last century. He believed that improving the lot of his fellow citizens was his obligation, and an honor to achieve. Andrew Carnegie was a truly great man and US patriot.
Here is a brief appreciation. Use Google for more about this great man who funded the libraries that educated the citizens who built this country, defeated the Axis dictators of Europe and Asia in WWII, and stared down the totalitarian dictators in the Cold War. (By the way, the megalomaniac Bill Gates isn't fit to view his grave.)
But what does this mean for the Authors Guild and their sniveling about Amazon offering used books? Simply this: serious authors (those who aren't just in it for the money) should (and do) measure their success not by royalties, but by how many people read and appreciate their works. They should not care (and the good ones don't) how many people _buy_ their books, but rather, how many people _read_ their books. The wise authors know that if they write well, lots of people will read what they write, and more people over time will buy their new works. It's only marginal authors and (more likely) their publishers who are whingeing at Amazon about the selling of used books online. Trading, lending and borrowing, even giving away used books are all Good Things.
Now we just need to get the same standards applied for books codified for CDs and DVDs, that is, utterly defeat the RIAA and MPAA attempts at taking over the world.
Copyright worked. The DMCA doesn't. Confusing the two is like confusing pedophilia with Catholicism.
Maybe that's a bad analogy. Lately, it does seem like a few _priests_ confused those last two.
Maybe they should come up with super duper Tivo box? That would be cool...
Think media streaming server. Compaq and Sun are already building these, but it sounds like Cray might beat them easily, if they bother to build one.
...I'd appreciate someone pointing me to the background for this story...
OK, here's the story. The local police busted a meth lab and found how-to drug manuals in a trailer, along with receipts from the bookstore. But the receipts didn't name the purchaser of the books, so the local DA subpoenaed the bookstore's customer records. The bookstore fought the subpoena and won.
I don't recall where I saw it today, but there was an article focused on AOL/TW and how disappointing it is to its stockholders, especially all the former Time-Warner stockholders.
Basically, AOL/TW is now worth about one-third of what the two companies were worth prior to the merger. Expected "synergies" haven't been realized - AOL/TW's biggest advertiser is... AOL/TW. And AOL hasn't executed on acquiring or leveraging the millions of cable subscribers hooked to Time-Warner.
But the article did compliment Steve Case for having realized AOL stock was ridiculously over-valued... and spending it quickly, before reality set in.
AOL/TW's stock is about $26 now, way down from its high. The article quoted analysts saying that most of that value is Time-Warner (about $22), with AOL only worth about $2 per share.
I thought it was interesting....
Well, in that case it's simply lame. Go see this for some funny April Fools stories.
I guess it's officially a "Slow News Day" at Slashdot when they get into Toilet Reviews.
Did I oversleep and Slashdot has rebranded itself to "News for Home Builders. Stuff that Sells." or what?
Sheesh!
The extent to which Microsoft escapes its current antitrust case with a slap-on-the-wrist penalty will likely be inversely proportional to the number of major corporate customers' defections from their new annual "software rental" product licensing schemes. I stand by my analysis.
We're _not_ stuck buying Microsoft's inferior OS and applications software - there are alternatives springing up all around us - and smart CIOs, CTOs, and even business PHBs _will_ migrate to them for competitive advantages. Microsoft's days are numbered, but we just don't know that number yet.
If you'd like to read the best independent analysis of Microsoft's financial fraud, go here.
Meanwhile, sell your Microsoft stock because its about as high as it's going to go on the way down.
Microsoft needs to make money to survive... and they are running out of ways to do so.
That's perceptive, but Microsoft (M$)is not a business (like IBM, say) that makes money and pays dividends to stockholders. M$ pays zero dividends but pays a substantial portion of employee compensation in the form of stock options (which it _doesn't_ expense against revenue but _does_ write off for tax purposes). M$'s employees exercise their stock options and take profits because the stock price is higher than the options' strike prices. This works because the market perceives that M$ will continue to expand and grow, thus its stock price remains high. Mutual funds and ordinary investors buy M$ stock from M$ insiders based upon an unrealistic belief in Microsoft's perpetual growth.
M$ is a very sophisticated pyramid scheme, but it is _just_ a pyramid scheme. They hide revenue and income in good quarters in order to prop up the numbers in poor quarters, thus creating the illusion of financial stability (and the SEC is investigating this). In prior years, M$ made nearly 10% of total revenues from selling Puts on its own stock (knowing that it could manage its numbers to keep the stock price high enough to make those Puts expire worthless or at least worth less than they were paid for them). In fact, M$ would have _lost_ money in all of the past several years if they'd had to expense their stock option grants to employees! That's why M$ is a pyramid scheme. Still with me?
M$ doesn't just need to make money to survive - they need to _grow_ to survive. Once their growth flattens for a few quarters, the big mutual funds will notice the lack of dividends and start selling their stock. Financial reform laws relative to employee stock option grants moving through the US Congress and likely to pass, post-Enron, will further depress M$ financial results. One of these quarters, M$ will have to pay off on all those Puts they sold, also cutting net income. The fall of Microsoft will be truly spectacular, although in slow motion like Enron, but much larger. Mutual funds, 401k plans, and individual investors who don't get out early will lose billions of dollars. Microsoft's current market capitalization - the total value of all stock outstanding - is over $325 billion; in contrast, IBM's market cap is only about $17.9 billion, but IBM annual revenues and profits are about 10 times Microsoft's. Begin to see the problem? This explains a lot about Microsoft's savage actions.
Expensive home-theater cables are really essential if you're going to get that full theater experience with faithful studio quality sound reproduction from 0-50Khz.
Besides, all those oxygen-free single-crystal silver mithric-clad super-insulated home-theater cables are keeping my former college ladyfriend happily in 12-cylinder BMW 750s.
His answer: "64-bit is SLOWER than 32-bit! With 64-bit there's DOUBLE the memory to go through, so it takes the program TWICE AS LONG to do anything!!!"
Well, he was partly sorta right. If your programmers misuse 64-bit data operands where 32-bit data would do just as well, the application is going to waste about half the memory cache space (at all levels), so it _will_ run much slower. 64-bit flat memory is useful, especially for large databases, but programmers still have to understand what they're doing (and what the compiler will do, how that will impact the processor, memory, etc.) or they can build programs that run slower than they did in 32-bits.
See the 64-bit computing faq that's up at AnandTech right now.
...there is a reasonable chance that Boeing has self-insured this satellite.
A great comfort to the 23,000+ people who are slated to get laid off by Boeing's commercial aircraft business this year, as a direct result of all the brain-dead Bush administration's "security" hysteria preventing the traveling public from... traveling.
are Microsoft's air supply. They'll battle red in tooth and claw for preloads. But if they lose them, well... Windows is dead, we all know this.
Shortly thereafter there was a quiet surrender ceremony where IBM handed over the "Evil Empire" moniker to Microsoft.
ROFL! That's so funny because it's so incredibly true. IBM is quietly happy about this, and rightly so. Understandably, Microsoft isn't - but most of their employees probably don't even realize why they've become so widely hated in the computing industry, or why it's well deserved.
IBM reached it's peak as an IT monopoly in the late '80s, then barely survived the backlash in the early '90s. But IBM had kickass hardware and software (still big money-makers), networking (since sold to AT&T and Cisco), and services (faltering, but still viable). IBM is also a very large multinational company (~$70 Billion annual revenue). IBM survived, but it's still a screwy company (I know, as I've worked there).
Microsoft is a much smaller company (under $10 billion annual revenue), and doesn't have complementary lines of business (though they're trying, but not very successfully), so their fall will be faster and harder. The late '90s will be seen as the highwater mark for Microsoft's IT monopoly. Their crash will hurt the US stock market, at least mutual funds in Microsoft. They don't pay dividends, ever. It's a sub-$10 stock.
The essence of the story of OS/2 is this: IBM gave away the PC Operating System to Bill Gates (Microsoft), then tried to recapture the PC platform with MicroChannel (implicating OS/2), but that didn't work out, so IBM tried partnering with Microsoft, which also didn't work, then finally IBM tried to build a real PC OS on it's own (OS/2 V3 and V4), but mis-handled it all horribly, and by then it was too late - Microsoft already had preloads, the political fix was in with the Courts, and the rest is history but still unfolding. But Microsoft's days are numbered....
Yeah, I've still got an OS/2 partition on my system (Warp 4 at Fixpak 15, the last one). It works fine, but I use Linux (Mandrake 8.1) now and that works better. I did the 25+ floppy installs of OS/2, got it working well enough to use it as my normal desktop through several years, even kept it running Lotus Notes shared with Windows partitions on notebooks for work, but now I use Linux almost exclusively. Linux is better.