The thing about metric is that it has even less to do with observable references than even US customary units.
"How long is a foot?"
"About the size of my shoe."
"How long is a meter?"
"One ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole along the Prime Meridian."
"... which is how long exactly?"
"Ten million meters."
*sound of slapping forehead*
"Is it easy? Think about it: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 2(4) hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year."
Hate to tell you this, but there is no international comittee out there that decides how many days there are in a year. The mass of the sun and our distance from it set that number to about 365.2425 (solar) days per year. And there is also no department of the UN that decides how long a day is, either.
As to seconds, minutes and hours, do you have any idea how much that would seriously fuck up longitude? You literally have no idea where you are if you can't remember how many degrees are in an hour, and if you want to change it from a nice even 15, the least of your worries is the replacement cost for that constellation of GPS satellites up there.
Or do you want to use radians there instead? There's an idea, basing your navigation system off of an irrational number, guaranteeing that you could never know where you are for sure.
"General, why did our 'smart' bombs miss their target?"
"We didn't carry pi out to enough decimal places..."
"Currently, all the world uses the Metric System except for the US."
What, 5.7 billion people can't be wrong? Metric wouldn't be the first bad idea that has come out of France, you know.
"But what about Time? The solution is Metric Time, that is, a time system which uses Base-10 and Metric Standards. So what do you think: Is it Time, for Metric Time?"
Why not base-2? Everybody will be using a calculator anyway... Hey, why not make all our numbers base 2? Whoops, I mean base-00000010
Real easy question to answer for me. Even if your spam account is free, you're still the one paying for the computer to access it, the phone line to dial in from, the electricity your computer runs off of, etc. Junk mailers pay 100% of the delivery costs. Period. All push, no pull. Not even telemarketers do that.
"it raises an interesting question as to which one is less annoying, environmental benefits aside."
Hrm... biodegradable paper (often post-consumer recycled content) or computers running off of coal-fired plants? Decisions, decisions...
"You can tell them it's your cell phone, and ask them where you can bill them for your minutes, but they just hang up on you."
I have a feeling that would be as effective as asking them where you can bill them for the use of your land line (which you also have to pay for). You're the one that gave them your phone number, you're the one that answered, and so the telemarketers feel content in placing the blame on your shoulders.
Microsoft is slowly but surely losing the current console war. They're still behind their major competitor (Sony) and, while they may be ahead of or behind Nintendo, they don't have Nintendo's ability to make money no matter what place they're in (observe N64). And now they want to make sure to pour cement into Xbox's grave by bringing out a new console already? This is up there with Sega's 32X/Saturn fiasco.
Somebody needs to inform Microsoft that this is not the PC industry. They may or may not be able to psych out Sony a bit, but Yamauchi is too much of a miserable old curmudgeon to do anything but laugh at Microsoft for this one.
Oh, and let's not forget that the "set top box" concept has yet to pan out (or even be fully realized) for it to be a profitable idea for Sony or Microsoft (ie. people aren't turning away from the GameCube simply because it doesn't play DVDs).
About the only effect I've heard of that this concept has had in the industry is that launch titles got burned as people bought the PlayStation 2 but no games (people got it as a new DVD player). From that experience alone Microsoft may drive away possible game writers as they try to put more and more functionality in to Xbox2.
The anonymous donor is Microsoft. The $200k isn't a reward per se, but the price they're offering to the first devleoper of the kernel for exclusive licensing rights. This is actually an attempt at an end-run around the Linux community, where they'll sue anybody else out of existance for "obviously reverse-engineering" Microsoft's kernel. They expect to make the money back and then some in these lawsuits.
Will they actually release the code? Only in some impossibly handicapped form that won't let you do much more than play Minesweeper. And five pages of fine print.
I have two replies to that. Take whichever one you want.
1.) There are six flags on the moon. All of them are ours. To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "No flags, no moon rocks."
2.) There's a (silly) little UN treaty that says everything that isn't earth belongs to "everybody," essentially that you can take whatever raw materials you can get. Going back to the previous simplification, "No Saturn Vs, no moon rocks."
I'm too lazy right now to dig up the sales numbers for you, but don't you think if the N64 was as "buried" as you claim it was that it would have gone the way of the Dreamcast? Don't you think the N64 would be sitting next to the forlorn Dreamcast shelves with the same clearance price tags? Don't you think it would have vanished long before today, almost seven years after its release?
"you were the laughing stock because of all of the horrible games"
All those horrible Nintendo titles that outsold even Squaresoft games? I have both an N64 and PSX and to this day the only game I've had to stand in line for in front of the store is Ocarina of Time. Even though I've bought Final Fantasy games on the day they were launched.
"and lack of many games."
Their lack of games came from a lack of third-party software support. But Nintendo was able to not only keep the system afloat but also competitive by relying on their own in-house development teams. I don't believe any other hardware or software company could have pulled that one off.
"Around here if you had an N64, you were the laughing stock"
Nintendo still has all their in-house teams developing exclusively for the GameCube while practically all major third-party developers are going hardware agnostic (meaning that the only exclusive games will be first- and second-party developers). We'll see who's still laughing a year from now. Heck, make it six months from now. Metroid Prime is looming on the horizon.
" there is a description of a Wi-Fi Communicator device. Just like on Star Trek"
So I'll be able to buy a "cell" phone that will let me talk to anybody in the star system, even and especially without line-of-sight? Sure as hell beats being out of service when I drive more than ten yards from the nearest interstate...
"I'm tired of only have Sony or Nintendo as an option, because they don't compete against each other..."
I'm sure they'd like to know this...
"those that buy Nintendo's products will continue to buy Nintendo products, and those who buy Sony products will continue to buy Sony products."
So... you're saying having a choice between two different philosophies is bad, and being able to choose between three carbon copies is good?
You may have a point about Nintendo fans being in it for the long haul, but please remember that this is only Sony's second console to date. Just because they're buying PS2s today doesn't mean they'll buy PS3s tomorrow (or even continue to buy PS2s). After all, most of the people that bought PSX today bought Sega yesterday, Nintendo the day before and Atari before that.
A lot of Nintendo people buy Nintendo stuff because they are God's gift to game developers (a point that has proven itself far too often to bother arguing about). Generally speaking, we don't care if Nintendo's new system will be two tin cans and a rock as long as we get to play Miyamoto's next games on it.
Sony, on the other hand, has shown a reliance on third-party developers, and their PSX sales were high because of the wide number of third parties that developed for it instead the N64. But even then they lost out to the N64 in many areas (including North America). In short, Sony isn't selling a Sony system, they're selling a non-Nintendo system. And Sony is heading for trouble because the vast majority of third-party games today are hardware agnostic. Even Final Fantasy's next installment will be on all three consoles.
If you say that Nintendo and Sony don't compete with each other, then by your own definition Microsoft is only aiming to compete with Sony. The majority of the games on both of those systems are aimed at the same audience.
"and Nintendo developers are now creating more mature games."
Pet peeve time: Anybody who says something like GTA3 is more mature than something like Zelda: Majora's Mask needs to have their head examined. That, or they're still in high school.
A/. member went to see a movie produced by a member of the Motion Picture Association of America starring in the lead role an ardent believer in the Church of Scientology, and that/. member didn't immediately burst into flames? Or would he have to have been wearing an "I (heart).NET" t-shirt for that to happen?
Where were you like two articles ago in the "Linux is Dying" thread? You're too busy over here trolling for console fans that you missed the obvious opportunity to throw in "BSD is Dying"
Or maybe this is a new opportunity for you to start "Nintendo is Dying"...
" I have yet to hear real numbers from a reliable source (and I have talked to several people inside MS) that prove or disprove this point. All the console manufacturers use the same business model."
Not necesarily. Sony and Microsoft would be losing money because they're using new, proprietary technology developed solely for their consoles and they can't get enough volume out for the price to start dropping off.
Nintendo, on the other hand, specifically went out of their way to avoid making another N64 and, in their efforts to make the console easier to write for (among other reasons), essentially used off-the-shelf parts to throw together the GCN. Practically right on up until the console itself was unveiled Nintendo told third-party developers that there was no need to get dev kits because there wasn't anything in the GCN that needed to have a new dev kit written for it.
Not having to throw money at the DVD Consortium only explains part of the price differences between the GCN and its competitors.
"Now I can finally buy American products at an acceptable price, while the reduced competition from American companies helps our companies grow."
Those two points of yours are mutually exclusive. Yes, you will be able to buy US goods at a better price, but that better price will likely undercut European manufacturers and bring more business to US exporters.
currency markets != stock markets != goods & services markets. The currency market is probably the most volatile you can find, and while the price of a dollar may be going down, the prices of goods and services marked in dollars are much more static and will stay at the same levels in relation to each other. Next week $0.25 may not get me 0.25 but it will still buy me a pack of gum until at least the end of the fiscal quarter.
Let's say I'm a US exporter selling widgest at $1.00 each. You want to buy some, and the exchange rates of the day are $1.00 = 1.00 so you send me 1.00 and get your widget. I then take the 1.00 and send it to my US bank, who then puts into the EU banking network and by the time the payment gets processed the exchange rates have changed to 1.00 = $1.10 and I just "made" a dime.
I may not have technically made money but, as I said before, things priced in US dollars go down along with the value of a dollar. The cost of me buying a widget from my wholesaler was $0.75 last week, $0.75 this week and it will be $0.75 next week, while in terms of euros it started at 0.75 and dropped down to about 0.63 in that same time period.
But even if I don't know the dollar will be slipping again next week, there's no reason (at least not in the short term) for me as a widgets seller to prop up my prices to compensate for the falling dollar because my wholesalers aren't raising their prices. And they're steady because the widget factory prices go down with the dollar, and so on and so forth all the way back to the US widgetonium mines.
And since the prices from US exporters remain static with the dollar (not the euro), those prices will undercut the local EU suppliers who can't afford to lower their prices. And since the WTO frowns upon tariffs and such, it will be the EU companies that start taking losses, not the US ones.
This is why the Japanese government is in a mad scramble to prop up the dollar while Washington is more than comfortable with cooling their heels for a while.
Here's a philosophical question for y'all: Who's worse, the CFO who skims a few billion off the top, or the day-traders that are (knowingly or unknowingly) looking for this kind of behavior so they can take their share as well? Are Enron investors outraged at the amoral actions of chief executives, or outraged that their amoral actions lost them money instead of gained?
On the bright side, UUNET going down will take all the associated spammers with them.:)
"I'm just thanking my stars that (so far) the politicians havent fscked up like they did after the '29 stock market crash. The US enacted protectionist trade tarrifs which effectively were the first blow in killing off the *world* economy."
I think this is the part that scares me the most, or at least that we have that much effect on the world economy. We have terrorist attacks in the past few months and the continuing threat of more attacks in the near future. This during the whole dot-com bubble bursting and tech companies taking big hits. Then we have Enron and Worldcomm and who know what else on the horizon. Not to mention the nose dive the US dollar is taking on the currency markets. And who gets hit hardest?
Europe and Japan.
Japan, already in the middle of a bank crisis they're too proud to admit to, is actively trying to prop the dollar up. The EU, who have been trying to bring the Euro to parity with the dollar, find themselves the victim of the ancient curse "May you get what you want." Foreign investors watch the value of their dollar investments go down while US exporters get nice perks like making money in currency exchange rates (even for small-time eBay shmucks like me). And I haven't even touched upon what this can do to China, who pretty much rely on their ability to export cheap labor. The only thing I'm not sure about is what this all means to those countries who have pegged their currencies to the dollar or have abandoned their currency for the dollar outright.
The scary news is that the US has some difficult economic times ahead of us. The sacrier news is that things will still probably be better here than anywhere else. The scariest news is that we'll probably come out of this even bigger than we were before.
"I've heard that the music industry is totally 0wned by the mob but I'm not too sure about this. If mob-0wnership is the case the situation just won't change."
Actually, I think mob ownership of the music industry would improve things. The mob cares enough about their customers to want to break their kneecaps. Corporations don't give a damn one way or the other, they're too busy licking the boots of the investors.
(No, I didn't plan on making references to my journal entry, it just came out that way.:) )
Why lose a little money on two different projects when you can combine the two and lose twice as much!
While I admit that I'm not looking at the video game market as much as I used to, it seems that Xbox sales are mediocre or so and the recent opening shots in the price war hasn't done much to change their sales figures. While they may or may not be ahead of Nintendo at this point in time, I don't see anything in Xbox's present or future that could hope to stand up to the onslaught that Metroid Prime and cel-shaded Zelda will create later this year. And that's even before we start noticing that it's just about time to announce a Pokemon game for the GBA. Come Christmas, I can't see the Xbox being anywhere but dead last and slipping fast.
On the other hand we have UltimateTV, in direct competition with TiVo, who gets bonus points for name recognition (I've seen a heck of a lot more TiVo ads than UltimateTV). Of course that really doesn't matter because PVRs are still a niche market today, with a slightly broader customer base than HDTV. I don't know anything about PVR sales figures comparing Microsoft vs. TiVo, but I imagine that Microsoft sales are hurting a bit due to consumers remembering the WebTV fiasco and a long history of patches and bugs (Yes, UltimateTV has had its share of patches already). Microsoft may or may not be making money off of UltimateTV, but I doubt it's enough to sustain itself.
Alright, so we have the Xbox and UltimateTV, two products with timid customers who probably had to be coaxed a little into buying to begin with (they had to be steered away from the PlayStation 2 and TiVo respectively). And they somehow think combining the two will actually help sales?
OK, all you people that own both an Xbox and an UltimateTV box please raise your hand. Anyone?
And I haven't even gotten into whether or not this may give their competitors ideas. What if TiVo signed up with Sony or Matsushita? Imagine Panasonic touting how their GameQ2 or whatever can not only play Pokemon games and Pokemon DVDs but also record Pokemon episodes while doing so...
"The Russian Parliament is planning to place off- and online restrictions to curb pro-Nazi and anti-religious activities"
Are we talking about a bill proposed by old-school comunists in Russia, or by a bill proposed by pro-EU elements? Keep in mind that this kind of law is very common in EU member states.
Who am I more afraid of? The pro-EU folks. They're the ones that seem to have a lousy track record with writing up touchy-feel anti-speech laws on the one hand and then not imposing them evenly on the other. After all, you can't talk bad about any other religion. Unless it's Islam. Then it's OK to talk about sealing off your borders to people from Arab countries just because a small percentage of their citizens happen to be terrorists. Racial profiling? Oh, no, that's that thing that only happens over in the US. Not in the EU.
Say what you will about the Soviets, but they had at least one thing going for them: While they were brutally opressive, they were generally brutally opressive evenly across all religions and cultures. If Christians and Muslims started killing each other in one of the Soviet republics or one of their satellite regimes, Moscow got grumpy, which made the KGB grumpy, which made the Red Army officers grumpy, and you go on down the line until you have a really grumpy soldier with a Kalashnikov who didn't give a rat's ass who worshipped who. And damn if things didn't get real quiet real quick. Keep in mind that all the trouble in Yugoslavia didn't happen until after the collapse of the USSR.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing I asked myself after reading about putting a camera in a cellphone is "Why would people want to send out photos of their ears?"
The thing about metric is that it has even less to do with observable references than even US customary units.
"How long is a foot?"
"About the size of my shoe."
"How long is a meter?"
"One ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole along the Prime Meridian."
"... which is how long exactly?"
"Ten million meters."
*sound of slapping forehead*
"Is it easy? Think about it: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 2(4) hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year."
Hate to tell you this, but there is no international comittee out there that decides how many days there are in a year. The mass of the sun and our distance from it set that number to about 365.2425 (solar) days per year. And there is also no department of the UN that decides how long a day is, either.
As to seconds, minutes and hours, do you have any idea how much that would seriously fuck up longitude? You literally have no idea where you are if you can't remember how many degrees are in an hour, and if you want to change it from a nice even 15, the least of your worries is the replacement cost for that constellation of GPS satellites up there.
Or do you want to use radians there instead? There's an idea, basing your navigation system off of an irrational number, guaranteeing that you could never know where you are for sure.
"General, why did our 'smart' bombs miss their target?"
"We didn't carry pi out to enough decimal places..."
"Currently, all the world uses the Metric System except for the US."
What, 5.7 billion people can't be wrong? Metric wouldn't be the first bad idea that has come out of France, you know.
"But what about Time? The solution is Metric Time, that is, a time system which uses Base-10 and Metric Standards. So what do you think: Is it Time, for Metric Time?"
Why not base-2? Everybody will be using a calculator anyway... Hey, why not make all our numbers base 2? Whoops, I mean base-00000010
You forgot the default value of "Save the children" in your tags there...
" People who read /. know all about the DMCA. Outside of that, I don't think anyone cares."
*cough* Sklyarov *cough*
Real easy question to answer for me. Even if your spam account is free, you're still the one paying for the computer to access it, the phone line to dial in from, the electricity your computer runs off of, etc. Junk mailers pay 100% of the delivery costs. Period. All push, no pull. Not even telemarketers do that.
"it raises an interesting question as to which one is less annoying, environmental benefits aside."
Hrm... biodegradable paper (often post-consumer recycled content) or computers running off of coal-fired plants? Decisions, decisions...
"You can tell them it's your cell phone, and ask them where you can bill them for your minutes, but they just hang up on you."
I have a feeling that would be as effective as asking them where you can bill them for the use of your land line (which you also have to pay for). You're the one that gave them your phone number, you're the one that answered, and so the telemarketers feel content in placing the blame on your shoulders.
Microsoft is slowly but surely losing the current console war. They're still behind their major competitor (Sony) and, while they may be ahead of or behind Nintendo, they don't have Nintendo's ability to make money no matter what place they're in (observe N64). And now they want to make sure to pour cement into Xbox's grave by bringing out a new console already? This is up there with Sega's 32X/Saturn fiasco.
Somebody needs to inform Microsoft that this is not the PC industry. They may or may not be able to psych out Sony a bit, but Yamauchi is too much of a miserable old curmudgeon to do anything but laugh at Microsoft for this one.
Oh, and let's not forget that the "set top box" concept has yet to pan out (or even be fully realized) for it to be a profitable idea for Sony or Microsoft (ie. people aren't turning away from the GameCube simply because it doesn't play DVDs).
About the only effect I've heard of that this concept has had in the industry is that launch titles got burned as people bought the PlayStation 2 but no games (people got it as a new DVD player). From that experience alone Microsoft may drive away possible game writers as they try to put more and more functionality in to Xbox2.
The anonymous donor is Microsoft. The $200k isn't a reward per se, but the price they're offering to the first devleoper of the kernel for exclusive licensing rights. This is actually an attempt at an end-run around the Linux community, where they'll sue anybody else out of existance for "obviously reverse-engineering" Microsoft's kernel. They expect to make the money back and then some in these lawsuits.
Will they actually release the code? Only in some impossibly handicapped form that won't let you do much more than play Minesweeper. And five pages of fine print.
I have two replies to that. Take whichever one you want.
1.) There are six flags on the moon. All of them are ours. To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "No flags, no moon rocks."
2.) There's a (silly) little UN treaty that says everything that isn't earth belongs to "everybody," essentially that you can take whatever raw materials you can get. Going back to the previous simplification, "No Saturn Vs, no moon rocks."
"Is das nicht ein BSD?"
...
"Will it nicht be dead shortly?"
Ehhh... not quite. If you go along with the German-ish theme of it you end up pronouncing BSD as "bay ess day" and then it doesn't rhyme.
"Und aren't they Taco's sex toys?"
I think this line needs another syllable, but other than that...
"The PSX absolutely buried the N64."
I'm too lazy right now to dig up the sales numbers for you, but don't you think if the N64 was as "buried" as you claim it was that it would have gone the way of the Dreamcast? Don't you think the N64 would be sitting next to the forlorn Dreamcast shelves with the same clearance price tags? Don't you think it would have vanished long before today, almost seven years after its release?
"you were the laughing stock because of all of the horrible games"
All those horrible Nintendo titles that outsold even Squaresoft games? I have both an N64 and PSX and to this day the only game I've had to stand in line for in front of the store is Ocarina of Time. Even though I've bought Final Fantasy games on the day they were launched.
"and lack of many games."
Their lack of games came from a lack of third-party software support. But Nintendo was able to not only keep the system afloat but also competitive by relying on their own in-house development teams. I don't believe any other hardware or software company could have pulled that one off.
"Around here if you had an N64, you were the laughing stock"
Nintendo still has all their in-house teams developing exclusively for the GameCube while practically all major third-party developers are going hardware agnostic (meaning that the only exclusive games will be first- and second-party developers). We'll see who's still laughing a year from now. Heck, make it six months from now. Metroid Prime is looming on the horizon.
" there is a description of a Wi-Fi Communicator device. Just like on Star Trek"
So I'll be able to buy a "cell" phone that will let me talk to anybody in the star system, even and especially without line-of-sight? Sure as hell beats being out of service when I drive more than ten yards from the nearest interstate...
Does this map have GPS coordinates of the primary spammers for a cruise missile strike?
"I'm tired of only have Sony or Nintendo as an option, because they don't compete against each other..."
I'm sure they'd like to know this...
"those that buy Nintendo's products will continue to buy Nintendo products, and those who buy Sony products will continue to buy Sony products."
So... you're saying having a choice between two different philosophies is bad, and being able to choose between three carbon copies is good?
You may have a point about Nintendo fans being in it for the long haul, but please remember that this is only Sony's second console to date. Just because they're buying PS2s today doesn't mean they'll buy PS3s tomorrow (or even continue to buy PS2s). After all, most of the people that bought PSX today bought Sega yesterday, Nintendo the day before and Atari before that.
A lot of Nintendo people buy Nintendo stuff because they are God's gift to game developers (a point that has proven itself far too often to bother arguing about). Generally speaking, we don't care if Nintendo's new system will be two tin cans and a rock as long as we get to play Miyamoto's next games on it.
Sony, on the other hand, has shown a reliance on third-party developers, and their PSX sales were high because of the wide number of third parties that developed for it instead the N64. But even then they lost out to the N64 in many areas (including North America). In short, Sony isn't selling a Sony system, they're selling a non-Nintendo system. And Sony is heading for trouble because the vast majority of third-party games today are hardware agnostic. Even Final Fantasy's next installment will be on all three consoles.
If you say that Nintendo and Sony don't compete with each other, then by your own definition Microsoft is only aiming to compete with Sony. The majority of the games on both of those systems are aimed at the same audience.
"and Nintendo developers are now creating more mature games."
Pet peeve time: Anybody who says something like GTA3 is more mature than something like Zelda: Majora's Mask needs to have their head examined. That, or they're still in high school.
A /. member went to see a movie produced by a member of the Motion Picture Association of America starring in the lead role an ardent believer in the Church of Scientology, and that /. member didn't immediately burst into flames? Or would he have to have been wearing an "I (heart) .NET" t-shirt for that to happen?
Where were you like two articles ago in the "Linux is Dying" thread? You're too busy over here trolling for console fans that you missed the obvious opportunity to throw in "BSD is Dying"
Or maybe this is a new opportunity for you to start "Nintendo is Dying"...
" I have yet to hear real numbers from a reliable source (and I have talked to several people inside MS) that prove or disprove this point. All the console manufacturers use the same business model."
Not necesarily. Sony and Microsoft would be losing money because they're using new, proprietary technology developed solely for their consoles and they can't get enough volume out for the price to start dropping off.
Nintendo, on the other hand, specifically went out of their way to avoid making another N64 and, in their efforts to make the console easier to write for (among other reasons), essentially used off-the-shelf parts to throw together the GCN. Practically right on up until the console itself was unveiled Nintendo told third-party developers that there was no need to get dev kits because there wasn't anything in the GCN that needed to have a new dev kit written for it.
Not having to throw money at the DVD Consortium only explains part of the price differences between the GCN and its competitors.
"Now I can finally buy American products at an acceptable price, while the reduced competition from American companies helps our companies grow."
Those two points of yours are mutually exclusive. Yes, you will be able to buy US goods at a better price, but that better price will likely undercut European manufacturers and bring more business to US exporters.
currency markets != stock markets != goods & services markets. The currency market is probably the most volatile you can find, and while the price of a dollar may be going down, the prices of goods and services marked in dollars are much more static and will stay at the same levels in relation to each other. Next week $0.25 may not get me 0.25 but it will still buy me a pack of gum until at least the end of the fiscal quarter.
Let's say I'm a US exporter selling widgest at $1.00 each. You want to buy some, and the exchange rates of the day are $1.00 = 1.00 so you send me 1.00 and get your widget. I then take the 1.00 and send it to my US bank, who then puts into the EU banking network and by the time the payment gets processed the exchange rates have changed to 1.00 = $1.10 and I just "made" a dime.
I may not have technically made money but, as I said before, things priced in US dollars go down along with the value of a dollar. The cost of me buying a widget from my wholesaler was $0.75 last week, $0.75 this week and it will be $0.75 next week, while in terms of euros it started at 0.75 and dropped down to about 0.63 in that same time period.
But even if I don't know the dollar will be slipping again next week, there's no reason (at least not in the short term) for me as a widgets seller to prop up my prices to compensate for the falling dollar because my wholesalers aren't raising their prices. And they're steady because the widget factory prices go down with the dollar, and so on and so forth all the way back to the US widgetonium mines.
And since the prices from US exporters remain static with the dollar (not the euro), those prices will undercut the local EU suppliers who can't afford to lower their prices. And since the WTO frowns upon tariffs and such, it will be the EU companies that start taking losses, not the US ones.
This is why the Japanese government is in a mad scramble to prop up the dollar while Washington is more than comfortable with cooling their heels for a while.
I think what we're really all waiting for is the (anti-)climatic conflict between Storm Troopers (who can't shoot) and red shirts (who must die).
*gesturing wildly towards sig*
:)
Here's a philosophical question for y'all: Who's worse, the CFO who skims a few billion off the top, or the day-traders that are (knowingly or unknowingly) looking for this kind of behavior so they can take their share as well? Are Enron investors outraged at the amoral actions of chief executives, or outraged that their amoral actions lost them money instead of gained?
On the bright side, UUNET going down will take all the associated spammers with them.
"I'm just thanking my stars that (so far) the politicians havent fscked up like they did after the '29 stock market crash. The US enacted protectionist trade tarrifs which effectively were the first blow in killing off the *world* economy."
I think this is the part that scares me the most, or at least that we have that much effect on the world economy. We have terrorist attacks in the past few months and the continuing threat of more attacks in the near future. This during the whole dot-com bubble bursting and tech companies taking big hits. Then we have Enron and Worldcomm and who know what else on the horizon. Not to mention the nose dive the US dollar is taking on the currency markets. And who gets hit hardest?
Europe and Japan.
Japan, already in the middle of a bank crisis they're too proud to admit to, is actively trying to prop the dollar up. The EU, who have been trying to bring the Euro to parity with the dollar, find themselves the victim of the ancient curse "May you get what you want." Foreign investors watch the value of their dollar investments go down while US exporters get nice perks like making money in currency exchange rates (even for small-time eBay shmucks like me). And I haven't even touched upon what this can do to China, who pretty much rely on their ability to export cheap labor. The only thing I'm not sure about is what this all means to those countries who have pegged their currencies to the dollar or have abandoned their currency for the dollar outright.
The scary news is that the US has some difficult economic times ahead of us. The sacrier news is that things will still probably be better here than anywhere else. The scariest news is that we'll probably come out of this even bigger than we were before.
"I've heard that the music industry is totally 0wned by the mob but I'm not too sure about this. If mob-0wnership is the case the situation just won't change."
:) )
Actually, I think mob ownership of the music industry would improve things. The mob cares enough about their customers to want to break their kneecaps. Corporations don't give a damn one way or the other, they're too busy licking the boots of the investors.
(No, I didn't plan on making references to my journal entry, it just came out that way.
Why lose a little money on two different projects when you can combine the two and lose twice as much!
While I admit that I'm not looking at the video game market as much as I used to, it seems that Xbox sales are mediocre or so and the recent opening shots in the price war hasn't done much to change their sales figures. While they may or may not be ahead of Nintendo at this point in time, I don't see anything in Xbox's present or future that could hope to stand up to the onslaught that Metroid Prime and cel-shaded Zelda will create later this year. And that's even before we start noticing that it's just about time to announce a Pokemon game for the GBA. Come Christmas, I can't see the Xbox being anywhere but dead last and slipping fast.
On the other hand we have UltimateTV, in direct competition with TiVo, who gets bonus points for name recognition (I've seen a heck of a lot more TiVo ads than UltimateTV). Of course that really doesn't matter because PVRs are still a niche market today, with a slightly broader customer base than HDTV. I don't know anything about PVR sales figures comparing Microsoft vs. TiVo, but I imagine that Microsoft sales are hurting a bit due to consumers remembering the WebTV fiasco and a long history of patches and bugs (Yes, UltimateTV has had its share of patches already). Microsoft may or may not be making money off of UltimateTV, but I doubt it's enough to sustain itself.
Alright, so we have the Xbox and UltimateTV, two products with timid customers who probably had to be coaxed a little into buying to begin with (they had to be steered away from the PlayStation 2 and TiVo respectively). And they somehow think combining the two will actually help sales?
OK, all you people that own both an Xbox and an UltimateTV box please raise your hand. Anyone?
And I haven't even gotten into whether or not this may give their competitors ideas. What if TiVo signed up with Sony or Matsushita? Imagine Panasonic touting how their GameQ2 or whatever can not only play Pokemon games and Pokemon DVDs but also record Pokemon episodes while doing so...
"The Russian Parliament is planning to place off- and online restrictions to curb pro-Nazi and anti-religious activities"
Are we talking about a bill proposed by old-school comunists in Russia, or by a bill proposed by pro-EU elements? Keep in mind that this kind of law is very common in EU member states.
Who am I more afraid of? The pro-EU folks. They're the ones that seem to have a lousy track record with writing up touchy-feel anti-speech laws on the one hand and then not imposing them evenly on the other. After all, you can't talk bad about any other religion. Unless it's Islam. Then it's OK to talk about sealing off your borders to people from Arab countries just because a small percentage of their citizens happen to be terrorists. Racial profiling? Oh, no, that's that thing that only happens over in the US. Not in the EU.
Say what you will about the Soviets, but they had at least one thing going for them: While they were brutally opressive, they were generally brutally opressive evenly across all religions and cultures. If Christians and Muslims started killing each other in one of the Soviet republics or one of their satellite regimes, Moscow got grumpy, which made the KGB grumpy, which made the Red Army officers grumpy, and you go on down the line until you have a really grumpy soldier with a Kalashnikov who didn't give a rat's ass who worshipped who. And damn if things didn't get real quiet real quick. Keep in mind that all the trouble in Yugoslavia didn't happen until after the collapse of the USSR.