I'll certainly concede that my terminology is imprecise. But I think your last paragraph is telling and illuminates the basis of any diagreement we might have, ``Any economist will tell you that the two main economic models are monopolistic competition (only Nike manufactures Nike shoes) and oligarchy (OPEC).''
This is not the case in most of the US, which is dominated by neo-classical economists who generally contend that economy approximates perfect competition even if it never perfectly reflects such a state. This claim, to my knowledge, has never been empirically verified by any study. But, from what I understand, in the rest of the world, there is a much more variation and a more realistic assessment of economic models.
And even if we say that perfect competition isn't necessary and hold a theory about option trades leading to general welfare, we still have problems. The claim that all (or even most) people are rational (in the economic sense) is highly contentious. Further, there are several markets: education, health care, defense, and security where planned economies do a measurably better job than a competitive market.
``Marx argued that everyone deserved to own the means of production, equally.''
Marx argued no such thing. What Marx argued is that everyone deserves to own the products of his or her own labor. The position you present as Marx's was that of Bauer and other left-Hegelians that Marx had little truck with.
``Lefties argue mostly the same thing -- that everyone is equal''
As do most righties, or at least what passes for a right wing in today's post-modern world. For the most part, left and right are both firmly in the tradition of classical liberalism which presupposes that everyone is fundamentally autonomous and, in this sense, is equal. This view stands firmly in opposition to the classical conservative position that some people, by virtue of their nobility, were more equal and deserved to be kings, queens, dukes, or duchesses.
Now, a small portion of the modern day left-wing espouses various forms of egalitarianism. That said, most lefties recognize that there are natural differences between various persons. What the the left tends to argue is that, as Rousseau observed, that certain artifacts of social life have magnified these natural differences to the point where they are absurd and detrimental to human progress as a whole.
``Capitalism is not the inverse of this (as most Lefties mis-interpret it). It declares that the capital (and means of production) should (and eventually will) flow to those most capable of using it efficiently; to produce a maximal, non-trivial result.''
But the problem is that Capitalism depends on assumptions about the free market that are demonstrably untrue. The elements of ``perfect competition'', as but one example, are absurd. There is no perfect freedom into and out of every industry, rather, every industry has a rather large barrier to both entry and exit. Consumers and producers do not have perfect knowledge of past, present and future. Consumers do not always buy at the market equilibrium price. Producers do not always sell at the market equilibrium price. Not all goods are identical commodities as demonstrated by the effects of branding upon the market.
You were complaining about the maxim that ``Remember, the cost of everything turns back into man-years of effort.'
This notion is the foundation of neo-Ricardian economics. Modern neo-Ricardian economics can account for well over 90% of the fluctuations in prices in the free market. Neo-Classical supply/demand price theory, which you seem to be equivocating with capitalism, cannot come close to this empirical track record. Pick up Sraffa's ``The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities'' for a good starting point.
``Proof: You spend 1 man-year acquiring a shovel and digging a ditch. I spend 364-man days designing, acquiring parts and building a back-hoe, and 1 day digging 100 times as much ditch.
``You are claiming that these man-years are identical. They are clearly not, hence your premise is false, by reductio-ad-absurdium.''
Actually, you just misunderstand the labor theory of value which argues that the value of a product is always determined by labor. One does not have to assume, as you do in your 'proof', that all labor is identical in value, only that there is a direct causal relation between the labor that creates a product and the value of that product. In this view, most firms set their own price rather than the price being determined by a market equilibrium. Consequently, you're argument is entirely built of straw.
When deciding between DSL and cable broadband, I asked myself whether the cable or the phone went out with greater frequency. Given that I grew up with one of the most notoriously unreliable cable providers and presently live in a city with one of the best telco providers in the US, I went with DSL.
Now, in my current area, I would never go with BPL because the power is highly unreliable. I can imagine that in some places, it might be a good deal better. I can also imagine that in places with no broadband alternatives, that a bad choice is better than no choice at all. I just don't see it as presently being highly competitive.
On the other hand, maybe it will finally give the local power company a reason to upgrade its lines.
I used to have a guy that lived in my neighborhood that broadcast his HAM with enough power that I heard him over my old fashioned wired telephone. If he broadcast while I was dialing, it screwed up my call completely. If he was busy with a monologue, I even had trouble getting a dial tone.
If this were the only HAM operator with such an attitude, I'd probably have a lot more sympathy for their plight. But I grew up in the city with an annual HAMfest. My overzealous neighbor was certainly not the only HAM operator that tended to interfere with me and my neighbors.
Just because lions are now predominantly found in warm weather climates does not mean that they have no adaptations for cold weather climates. It could be the case that lions no longer inhabit colder regions for other reasons, such as being crowded out of their habitats by other species or being hunted to extinction.
Do note that many big cats, mountain lions and siberian tigers for example, inhabit cold regions. And in fact, lions ranged over most of eastern Europe and Asia up until the 2nd century AD. And cheetahs were once found as far north as northern Iran. The US certainly has some geographical areas with more temperate zones than along the coast of the Caspian Sea.
Rather, Microsoft is a supplier to Apple's biggest competitors. That is a key distinction. Apple, at this point, wants to avoid face to face competition with Microsoft. Presently, it would be difficult (not impossible) for Apple to survive if Microsoft stopped shipping Office for OS X. Should Apple ever go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, that will probably happen.
But also note that Apple has been working on putting itself into a position that solves this problem for quite some time. It wasn't all that long ago that Microsoft could have essentially killed Apple by merely halting work in Internet Explorer for Macs. Apple has not only changed the landscape with regards to web browsing, but has begun to build its own office application stack. In the future, they may be ready to compete head on with Microsoft.
But for now, they want to avoid direct competition with Microsoft at all costs. Sure, Steve Jobs loves to slam Windows during his keynotes. But those barbs aren't really targetted at Microsoft, but at manufacturers that bundle Windows. Relatively few people intentionally buy Windows, but rather seek out hardware that ships with Windows.
Finally, our points about companies that make ``just hardware'' also holds for companies that make ``just software.'' Lotus, Borland, Word Perfect, PKWare, Metrowerks, Digital Research, Novell and a whole host of other pure software players are either gone or marginalized. This is a tendency, not of their respective portions of the IT market, but of the IT market as a whole as the industry matures. The same thing happened to the automotive industry in the fifties and sixties. Mature industries tend toward consolidation and the IT industry is following the same pattern as all previous industries.
Presently, the IT hardware industry has a normal profit margin of around 10%. The IT software industry has a normal profit margin of closer to 30%. So, I will concede that running a software firm is easier in certain aspects than running a hardware firm. But this doesn't mean that the Apples, Hewlett Packards, and Dells can't carve out profitable futures. Heck, some grocery chains are prospering and their normal profit margin is between 1% and 2%.
Apple isn't poised to take on Microsoft until they have their own, fully MS Office compatible, office suite. The moment Apple unties OS X from their own hardware, Microsoft will yank Office for OS X.
The web browser is ready. The presentation software is almost ready. The word processor has started. The biggest pieces missing are the spreadsheet and the Exchange client. (And note that last is an Exchange client and not an email program.) The database, however, doesn't seem to be on the drawing board. 'Tis a real pity that Apple didn't keep Hypercard up to date. Hypercard could have been the Access killer.
Apple might be ready to do this down the road. But for the immediately foreseeable future, OS X will remain tied to Apple hardware, even if for no other reason than Microsoft is still the 800lb gorilla in the market. Which also raises another point. Apple may have other reasons not to do this aside from pressure from Microsoft. Recall that Apple's last experiment with cloning didn't fare so well for Apple.
Aside from the prodigous work that went into their OMNI print driver, they did their best to support a tremendous amount of hardware with OS/2 versions 2 through 4. In some cases (Mitsumi CD roms with the proprietary ISA card interface as one example), it was easier to get popular but non-standard hardware working with OS/2 v. 3 than with Windows 95.
You may be right that Sun is more committed to driver support than IBM was. But it seems to me that most hardware OEMs will be even more reticent to support a new OS than back in the hayday of OS/2. Solaris x86 is an even smaller market segment than OS/2 was in the mid-nineties.
That said, there is one thing that does help swing things in Sun's favor. Hardware has become increasingly standardized. Rather than needing to support twenty different proprietary CDROM interfaces, Sun only needs to support ATAPI. Likewise, many other devices are much more standardized than they were ten years ago.
If conversations could only be similar in a single fashion, your criticism would be valid. But as conversations have multiple senses in which they can be similar, your criticism comes of as being rather ignorant. Any two conversations regarding the same topic can be said to be similar, even if they have different outcomes. Consequently, it is quite possible that the discussions between IBM and other PC vendors may sound unlike similar conversation between Sun and other PC vendors.
If they do offer Solaris as an option (1) they don't advertise it and (2) they make it difficult to find because searching for Solaris on HP's website brings up conversion kits to Tru64 UNIX or HP/UX as the top links.
Any LIDIL based printer (about 1/3 of HP's current offerings) will not work with Windows 2003. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, because why would anyone forking out for Windows Server licensing be concerned about having to avoid the lowest cost printers in favor of more expensive kit? But aside from developers trying to get it running on their workstation, the inability of LIDIL printers to communicate with PS and PCL drivers means that all Windows Terminal Services users are also unable to print from the WTS client to LIDIL printers.
IBM discovered the hard way in the nineties that a hardware manufacturer trying to get competing hardware manufacturers to support their OS is a dead end. Discussions between IBM and the other PC vendors sounded a lot like similar conversations will if Sun tries to get PC manufacturers onboard the Solaris wagon:
Sun: Hi, HP, what do you think about preloading Solaris on your workstations? HP: Yeah, right! Why would we want to license or support our competitor's operating system for our hardware?
Sure, Sun might be able to get a few PC peripheral vendors on board. But, honestly, what kind of target market can Sun tempt them with? Solaris x86 has a smaller presence than Linux and you've already said that these same vendors aren't getting on the Linux bandwagon.
I just don't think that the consequences of a different environment would be a difference on an order of magnitude. I also think you paint a bleaker picture of US society than really exists. Certainly, there are areas of the US that are extremely hostile to gays and lesbians. But there also also large swaths of the US where gays and lesbian lifestyles are accepted as being perfectly normal.
Studies suggest that children raised by gay parents only have only a marginally increased likelihood of being gay when compared to children raised by straight parents. Given that children tend to adopt the beliefs and convictions of their parents with regards to politics and religion, even in environments where society is hostile to those beliefs and convictions, I would expect the numbers to be far higher rather than only marginally higher/if/ being raised in an environment that is supportive of being gay is a/significant/ contributing factor to being gay.
I do think that we need to be wary of hidden biases. Self-description as a measurement is prone to societal bias. Like you pointed out, people may not be fully revealing to survey takers. This could be for any number of reasons. That said, societal bias is certainly changing in most of the US. If you're remembering the 2% figure correctly, and assuming that the studies you're remembering had a valid methodology, I would be surprised if the real number were any higher than 3 or 4%.
But as a matter of practicality, that extra time will not be used productively.
Aside from which, most of the people using Exchange will be salaried workers, not hourly workers. In which case, giving a few additional minutes per week has no financial impact to the corporation.
Not to mention that the article claims that most of these solutions provide all the features of Outlook that are commonly used. Your argument only applies to corporations that use features that are not present in a replacement. Most companies simply don't leverage Exchange to its fullest.
Look at Kinsey's methodology. His sample was anything by random and it is difficult to argue that his sample is really representative of the US population at large. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Kinsey had an axe to grind and sensationalized his work in order to use it as a catalyst for the changes that he wanted to see in society.
Most modern studies put the percentage of gays in the general population at somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 100. The last time I looked into the research (some five years ago) there wasn't any well accepted figure. Things may have changed since then.
Saving 300K for every 10k users is not peanuts. My previous employer would have saved well over 1M. Granted, that would be a relatively small portion of total costs, but it may very well make the difference between posting a loss and posting a gain on the balance sheet in a tough fiscal year.
1. Assumes that Yahoo's expansion is random. If the increase in Yahoo's pages are not random, then the results may be skewed. For example, Yahoo's expansion may have been mostly, or even entirely, in pages built of common words that all receive more than 1000 hits upon searching.
2. Assumes, as many people have stated, that by using an English dictionary for its seeds, the study assumes that Yahoo's expansion has been in English. If Yahoo has expanded it's database in non-English pages with few words that overlap into English, those pages will not show up in the study.
This study essentially determines that Google has a larger database of random, obscure English language words. Consequently, they demonstrate that Google is the superior search engine for finding obscure, random English words.
One additional check that they could have thrown in would be how many of the pages in the links presently deliver 404 errors. That would have been far more interesting to me than how well the search engines do at finding obscure and random English words.
You've just conceded my point. Your only apparent disagreement is one of quantity. Personally, I think that there are a large number of things that are not fun to learn no matter how they are approached. I will concede that, with most things, it is almost always possible to learn a limited amount in a fun fashion. That said, learning most skills (as one example) take a huge amount of tedious repetition that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make fun.
But FreeWWWeb was national. They provided a free ppp account that could be dialed from every major US city. It's one thing to give away bandwidth on your own equipment, but another thing entirely to be buying bandwidth in bulk from national providers to give away for free.
Most of them burn some flavor of alcohol gel. They burn clean enough that no chimney is required. They do create excess water vapor which, in the winter, is usually a good thing. (Unless of course, your house has humidity problems, in which case, this will make an existing problem worse.)
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I'll certainly concede that my terminology is imprecise. But I think your last paragraph is telling and illuminates the basis of any diagreement we might have, ``Any economist will tell you that the two main economic models are monopolistic competition (only Nike manufactures Nike shoes) and oligarchy (OPEC).''
This is not the case in most of the US, which is dominated by neo-classical economists who generally contend that economy approximates perfect competition even if it never perfectly reflects such a state. This claim, to my knowledge, has never been empirically verified by any study. But, from what I understand, in the rest of the world, there is a much more variation and a more realistic assessment of economic models.
And even if we say that perfect competition isn't necessary and hold a theory about option trades leading to general welfare, we still have problems. The claim that all (or even most) people are rational (in the economic sense) is highly contentious. Further, there are several markets: education, health care, defense, and security where planned economies do a measurably better job than a competitive market.
``Marx argued that everyone deserved to own the means of production, equally.''
Marx argued no such thing. What Marx argued is that everyone deserves to own the products of his or her own labor. The position you present as Marx's was that of Bauer and other left-Hegelians that Marx had little truck with.
``Lefties argue mostly the same thing -- that everyone is equal''
As do most righties, or at least what passes for a right wing in today's post-modern world. For the most part, left and right are both firmly in the tradition of classical liberalism which presupposes that everyone is fundamentally autonomous and, in this sense, is equal. This view stands firmly in opposition to the classical conservative position that some people, by virtue of their nobility, were more equal and deserved to be kings, queens, dukes, or duchesses.
Now, a small portion of the modern day left-wing espouses various forms of egalitarianism. That said, most lefties recognize that there are natural differences between various persons. What the the left tends to argue is that, as Rousseau observed, that certain artifacts of social life have magnified these natural differences to the point where they are absurd and detrimental to human progress as a whole.
``Capitalism is not the inverse of this (as most Lefties mis-interpret it). It declares that the capital (and means of production) should (and eventually will) flow to those most capable of using it efficiently; to produce a maximal, non-trivial result.''
But the problem is that Capitalism depends on assumptions about the free market that are demonstrably untrue. The elements of ``perfect competition'', as but one example, are absurd. There is no perfect freedom into and out of every industry, rather, every industry has a rather large barrier to both entry and exit. Consumers and producers do not have perfect knowledge of past, present and future. Consumers do not always buy at the market equilibrium price. Producers do not always sell at the market equilibrium price. Not all goods are identical commodities as demonstrated by the effects of branding upon the market.
You were complaining about the maxim that ``Remember, the cost of everything turns back into man-years of effort.'
This notion is the foundation of neo-Ricardian economics. Modern neo-Ricardian economics can account for well over 90% of the fluctuations in prices in the free market. Neo-Classical supply/demand price theory, which you seem to be equivocating with capitalism, cannot come close to this empirical track record. Pick up Sraffa's ``The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities'' for a good starting point.
``Proof: You spend 1 man-year acquiring a shovel and digging a ditch. I spend 364-man days designing, acquiring parts and building a back-hoe, and 1 day digging 100 times as much ditch.
``You are claiming that these man-years are identical. They are clearly not, hence your premise is false, by reductio-ad-absurdium.''
Actually, you just misunderstand the labor theory of value which argues that the value of a product is always determined by labor. One does not have to assume, as you do in your 'proof', that all labor is identical in value, only that there is a direct causal relation between the labor that creates a product and the value of that product. In this view, most firms set their own price rather than the price being determined by a market equilibrium. Consequently, you're argument is entirely built of straw.
When deciding between DSL and cable broadband, I asked myself whether the cable or the phone went out with greater frequency. Given that I grew up with one of the most notoriously unreliable cable providers and presently live in a city with one of the best telco providers in the US, I went with DSL.
Now, in my current area, I would never go with BPL because the power is highly unreliable. I can imagine that in some places, it might be a good deal better. I can also imagine that in places with no broadband alternatives, that a bad choice is better than no choice at all. I just don't see it as presently being highly competitive.
On the other hand, maybe it will finally give the local power company a reason to upgrade its lines.
I used to have a guy that lived in my neighborhood that broadcast his HAM with enough power that I heard him over my old fashioned wired telephone. If he broadcast while I was dialing, it screwed up my call completely. If he was busy with a monologue, I even had trouble getting a dial tone.
If this were the only HAM operator with such an attitude, I'd probably have a lot more sympathy for their plight. But I grew up in the city with an annual HAMfest. My overzealous neighbor was certainly not the only HAM operator that tended to interfere with me and my neighbors.
Just because lions are now predominantly found in warm weather climates does not mean that they have no adaptations for cold weather climates. It could be the case that lions no longer inhabit colder regions for other reasons, such as being crowded out of their habitats by other species or being hunted to extinction.
Do note that many big cats, mountain lions and siberian tigers for example, inhabit cold regions. And in fact, lions ranged over most of eastern Europe and Asia up until the 2nd century AD. And cheetahs were once found as far north as northern Iran. The US certainly has some geographical areas with more temperate zones than along the coast of the Caspian Sea.
Rather, Microsoft is a supplier to Apple's biggest competitors. That is a key distinction. Apple, at this point, wants to avoid face to face competition with Microsoft. Presently, it would be difficult (not impossible) for Apple to survive if Microsoft stopped shipping Office for OS X. Should Apple ever go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, that will probably happen.
But also note that Apple has been working on putting itself into a position that solves this problem for quite some time. It wasn't all that long ago that Microsoft could have essentially killed Apple by merely halting work in Internet Explorer for Macs. Apple has not only changed the landscape with regards to web browsing, but has begun to build its own office application stack. In the future, they may be ready to compete head on with Microsoft.
But for now, they want to avoid direct competition with Microsoft at all costs. Sure, Steve Jobs loves to slam Windows during his keynotes. But those barbs aren't really targetted at Microsoft, but at manufacturers that bundle Windows. Relatively few people intentionally buy Windows, but rather seek out hardware that ships with Windows.
Finally, our points about companies that make ``just hardware'' also holds for companies that make ``just software.'' Lotus, Borland, Word Perfect, PKWare, Metrowerks, Digital Research, Novell and a whole host of other pure software players are either gone or marginalized. This is a tendency, not of their respective portions of the IT market, but of the IT market as a whole as the industry matures. The same thing happened to the automotive industry in the fifties and sixties. Mature industries tend toward consolidation and the IT industry is following the same pattern as all previous industries.
Presently, the IT hardware industry has a normal profit margin of around 10%. The IT software industry has a normal profit margin of closer to 30%. So, I will concede that running a software firm is easier in certain aspects than running a hardware firm. But this doesn't mean that the Apples, Hewlett Packards, and Dells can't carve out profitable futures. Heck, some grocery chains are prospering and their normal profit margin is between 1% and 2%.
Apple isn't poised to take on Microsoft until they have their own, fully MS Office compatible, office suite. The moment Apple unties OS X from their own hardware, Microsoft will yank Office for OS X.
The web browser is ready. The presentation software is almost ready. The word processor has started. The biggest pieces missing are the spreadsheet and the Exchange client. (And note that last is an Exchange client and not an email program.) The database, however, doesn't seem to be on the drawing board. 'Tis a real pity that Apple didn't keep Hypercard up to date. Hypercard could have been the Access killer.
Apple might be ready to do this down the road. But for the immediately foreseeable future, OS X will remain tied to Apple hardware, even if for no other reason than Microsoft is still the 800lb gorilla in the market. Which also raises another point. Apple may have other reasons not to do this aside from pressure from Microsoft. Recall that Apple's last experiment with cloning didn't fare so well for Apple.
Aside from the prodigous work that went into their OMNI print driver, they did their best to support a tremendous amount of hardware with OS/2 versions 2 through 4. In some cases (Mitsumi CD roms with the proprietary ISA card interface as one example), it was easier to get popular but non-standard hardware working with OS/2 v. 3 than with Windows 95.
You may be right that Sun is more committed to driver support than IBM was. But it seems to me that most hardware OEMs will be even more reticent to support a new OS than back in the hayday of OS/2. Solaris x86 is an even smaller market segment than OS/2 was in the mid-nineties.
That said, there is one thing that does help swing things in Sun's favor. Hardware has become increasingly standardized. Rather than needing to support twenty different proprietary CDROM interfaces, Sun only needs to support ATAPI. Likewise, many other devices are much more standardized than they were ten years ago.
If conversations could only be similar in a single fashion, your criticism would be valid. But as conversations have multiple senses in which they can be similar, your criticism comes of as being rather ignorant. Any two conversations regarding the same topic can be said to be similar, even if they have different outcomes. Consequently, it is quite possible that the discussions between IBM and other PC vendors may sound unlike similar conversation between Sun and other PC vendors.
Any LIDIL based printer (about 1/3 of HP's current offerings) will not work with Windows 2003. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, because why would anyone forking out for Windows Server licensing be concerned about having to avoid the lowest cost printers in favor of more expensive kit? But aside from developers trying to get it running on their workstation, the inability of LIDIL printers to communicate with PS and PCL drivers means that all Windows Terminal Services users are also unable to print from the WTS client to LIDIL printers.
IBM discovered the hard way in the nineties that a hardware manufacturer trying to get competing hardware manufacturers to support their OS is a dead end. Discussions between IBM and the other PC vendors sounded a lot like similar conversations will if Sun tries to get PC manufacturers onboard the Solaris wagon:
Sun: Hi, HP, what do you think about preloading Solaris on your workstations?
HP: Yeah, right! Why would we want to license or support our competitor's operating system for our hardware?
Sure, Sun might be able to get a few PC peripheral vendors on board. But, honestly, what kind of target market can Sun tempt them with? Solaris x86 has a smaller presence than Linux and you've already said that these same vendors aren't getting on the Linux bandwagon.
But do honestly think that the average consumer of a Big Mac is going to be able to notice?
I just don't think that the consequences of a different environment would be a difference on an order of magnitude. I also think you paint a bleaker picture of US society than really exists. Certainly, there are areas of the US that are extremely hostile to gays and lesbians. But there also also large swaths of the US where gays and lesbian lifestyles are accepted as being perfectly normal.
Studies suggest that children raised by gay parents only have only a marginally increased likelihood of being gay when compared to children raised by straight parents. Given that children tend to adopt the beliefs and convictions of their parents with regards to politics and religion, even in environments where society is hostile to those beliefs and convictions, I would expect the numbers to be far higher rather than only marginally higher /if/ being raised in an environment that is supportive of being gay is a /significant/ contributing factor to being gay.
I do think that we need to be wary of hidden biases. Self-description as a measurement is prone to societal bias. Like you pointed out, people may not be fully revealing to survey takers. This could be for any number of reasons. That said, societal bias is certainly changing in most of the US. If you're remembering the 2% figure correctly, and assuming that the studies you're remembering had a valid methodology, I would be surprised if the real number were any higher than 3 or 4%.
But as a matter of practicality, that extra time will not be used productively.
Aside from which, most of the people using Exchange will be salaried workers, not hourly workers. In which case, giving a few additional minutes per week has no financial impact to the corporation.
Not to mention that the article claims that most of these solutions provide all the features of Outlook that are commonly used. Your argument only applies to corporations that use features that are not present in a replacement. Most companies simply don't leverage Exchange to its fullest.
Look at Kinsey's methodology. His sample was anything by random and it is difficult to argue that his sample is really representative of the US population at large. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Kinsey had an axe to grind and sensationalized his work in order to use it as a catalyst for the changes that he wanted to see in society.
Most modern studies put the percentage of gays in the general population at somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 100. The last time I looked into the research (some five years ago) there wasn't any well accepted figure. Things may have changed since then.
Saving 300K for every 10k users is not peanuts. My previous employer would have saved well over 1M. Granted, that would be a relatively small portion of total costs, but it may very well make the difference between posting a loss and posting a gain on the balance sheet in a tough fiscal year.
1. Assumes that Yahoo's expansion is random. If the increase in Yahoo's pages are not random, then the results may be skewed. For example, Yahoo's expansion may have been mostly, or even entirely, in pages built of common words that all receive more than 1000 hits upon searching.
2. Assumes, as many people have stated, that by using an English dictionary for its seeds, the study assumes that Yahoo's expansion has been in English. If Yahoo has expanded it's database in non-English pages with few words that overlap into English, those pages will not show up in the study.
This study essentially determines that Google has a larger database of random, obscure English language words. Consequently, they demonstrate that Google is the superior search engine for finding obscure, random English words.
One additional check that they could have thrown in would be how many of the pages in the links presently deliver 404 errors. That would have been far more interesting to me than how well the search engines do at finding obscure and random English words.
Both are current products even if they don't get much shelf space or press attention.
You've just conceded my point. Your only apparent disagreement is one of quantity. Personally, I think that there are a large number of things that are not fun to learn no matter how they are approached. I will concede that, with most things, it is almost always possible to learn a limited amount in a fun fashion. That said, learning most skills (as one example) take a huge amount of tedious repetition that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make fun.
Is that learning isn't always fun and children raised that way will only learn /when/ it is fun.
I, for one, don't want my children to limited by only learning that which is fun to learn.
But FreeWWWeb was national. They provided a free ppp account that could be dialed from every major US city. It's one thing to give away bandwidth on your own equipment, but another thing entirely to be buying bandwidth in bulk from national providers to give away for free.
How did anyone expect to make money on providing free internet service with no ads?
Most of them burn some flavor of alcohol gel. They burn clean enough that no chimney is required. They do create excess water vapor which, in the winter, is usually a good thing. (Unless of course, your house has humidity problems, in which case, this will make an existing problem worse.)