Loved that Onion article!! Glad to see you've got a sense of humor about what, while an increasing trend, still seems a bit of an idiosyncrasy. As you mentioned, difficult with children -- probably not impossible, but Very difficult. For me, there is still enough quality stuff on, which if you truly are sans TV, you have shoved in your face every time you mention it. In a way, I am the other stereotype -- the TV snob who would do without a TV were it not for X, Y and Z... with X, Y and Z showing my astute taste in the finer things in life and oh, also not mentioning the other crap that sneaks into my TV diet as a result of the beast being in the room. The DVR has turned the TV into a new animal. For those of us who can't 'do without', it does allow us to minimize our time in front of the Glass Teat as Harlan called it...
I've always liked the idea of a merged Apple & Sun -- from way back. Doesn't make much business sense though of course.
Maybe more plausible is the HP idea -- the indigestion brought on by the Compaq merger (18-19B) is fading into memory. But still, not a good business case. Companies like HP and IBM have been increasingly eating into Sun's marketshare. Why not just try and drive them out of business?
Oracle? Not likely. Ellison is already dealing with his recent mega enterprise software acquisitions. And why get into hardware?
Going private. Interesting idea, but Sun's stock price is still way too high to do this. Get it down to 1$/shr and perhaps, but at that point, it might be too late if things were that bad. Many of the dot-bomb 'white-dwarf' compaies (ex: Buy.com) did exactly this. Buy.com is now profitable and could even re-IPO in the future.
Spliting the company into Hardware/Software? Never or maybe as a last resort to facilitate their IP not falling into 'evil' hands.
What's left? More of the same I'd bet... and lot's of great rumors!
Well I'm sure they've patented this technology or are attempting to patent it. If so, then that's your best source for getting the nitty gritty details of the technology.
Now getting the patent search done -- that's another story;)
As a curios young teenager I read my dads copy of Erich Von Daniken's infamous "Chariots of the Gods". I fell hook, line and sinker and I wasn't the only one -- remember the great TV specials the book spawned? "Next on ABC right after That's Incredible... Amazing Computer astronomy from Incan and Egyptian ruins" Come on, who else could have made those Easter Island statues? They were Gigantic! In my mind, South America seemed a veritable hotbed of desert alien landing sites, batteries made out of rocks and copper and maybe even some human experimentation!! What other explanation could there be but alien influence??? I wanted to believe.
What a disappointment it was a few years later to read some books with somewhat less sensationalistic interpretations of the same data. Boy those writers sure didn't know how to sex-up the information like good old Daniken, but their views somehow seemed more plausible. I didn't know about Ockham's Razor at the time, but a skeptic was born.
Flash forward another decade and a half. A friend and I went to see Oliver Stone's JFK. Another obsession from childhood - old newspaper clippings and memorial books from before your birth packed away in boxes. Preserved. Must be very important. I was primed as I walked into the theatre. Stone lined em um and knocked em down. How could any intelligent person have walked out of that movie unconvinced? I came out wanting to do something. What I didn't know, but I was pissed off. At who? Our government of course - past and present. Who else could have perpetrated such a vast conspiracy? I wanted to march on Washington and force them if necessary to release the 'facts' that would prove once and for all what Stone had convinced me of. I wanted to believe.
Well, it didn't take years this time. The next morning I woke up feeling as if I had escaped from some cult brainwashing session. I was thankful I hadn't gone out and flipped over some cop car and tossed a Molotov cocktail through the smashed windows chanting '...enough lies, enough lies, impeach Reagan!!'... '...dig up Johnson's bones and put him on trial!!'
Well, I'm sitting here trying to rationalize seeing and not seeing this flick. On the one hand, I know where Moore's going with the film, and I understand most of the issues he covers, so why bother? I get lots of opinions these days. On the other hand, the medium is powerful and the documentary format even more so. Riefenstahl opened a lot of eyes I'm sure.
I guess not seeing it has finally won out. Why? I guess the issues are too important to be paying for Moore's take on it. Maybe I want the illusion at least of making up my own mind.
Darn those Chinese capitalists. How dare they have the nerve to charge for their brand of 'piracy'. Seems that most of the youth today believes in good ol communism, or as they prefer to call it, 'sharing'. I mean, what a clever way to redistribute wealth. Moby's got too much money, so let's spread the wealth. Cause that's all your really doing. The $20 your ecstasy addled, MP3 swapping, deliquent slacker fried didn't have to spend on buying the CD, can now be spent on a $10 movie ticket and a $8 bag of popcorn and coke, until he finds a way to 'share' that as well.
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Loved that Onion article!! Glad to see you've got a sense of humor about what, while an increasing trend, still seems a bit of an idiosyncrasy. As you mentioned, difficult with children -- probably not impossible, but Very difficult. For me, there is still enough quality stuff on, which if you truly are sans TV, you have shoved in your face every time you mention it. In a way, I am the other stereotype -- the TV snob who would do without a TV were it not for X, Y and Z... with X, Y and Z showing my astute taste in the finer things in life and oh, also not mentioning the other crap that sneaks into my TV diet as a result of the beast being in the room. The DVR has turned the TV into a new animal. For those of us who can't 'do without', it does allow us to minimize our time in front of the Glass Teat as Harlan called it...
Not to give ya a hard time, but believe it or not "Totally" actually had a meaning beyond the now a tad dated colloqial valley-girl usage.
:(
FWIW I think he did mean totally or completely crystallized...
Dude, I feel like a total tool for even posting this jab... -2 karma for me
I've always liked the idea of a merged Apple & Sun -- from way back. Doesn't make much business sense though of course.
Maybe more plausible is the HP idea -- the indigestion brought on by the Compaq merger (18-19B) is fading into memory. But still, not a good business case. Companies like HP and IBM have been increasingly eating into Sun's marketshare. Why not just try and drive them out of business?
Oracle? Not likely. Ellison is already dealing with his recent mega enterprise software acquisitions. And why get into hardware?
Going private. Interesting idea, but Sun's stock price is still way too high to do this. Get it down to 1$/shr and perhaps, but at that point, it might be too late if things were that bad. Many of the dot-bomb 'white-dwarf' compaies (ex: Buy.com) did exactly this. Buy.com is now profitable and could even re-IPO in the future.
Spliting the company into Hardware/Software? Never or maybe as a last resort to facilitate their IP not falling into 'evil' hands.
What's left? More of the same I'd bet... and lot's of great rumors!
Well I'm sure they've patented this technology or are attempting to patent it. If so, then that's your best source for getting the nitty gritty details of the technology.
;)
Now getting the patent search done -- that's another story
As a curios young teenager I read my dads copy of Erich Von Daniken's infamous "Chariots of the Gods". I fell hook, line and sinker and I wasn't the only one -- remember the great TV specials the book spawned? "Next on ABC right after That's Incredible... Amazing Computer astronomy from Incan and Egyptian ruins" Come on, who else could have made those Easter Island statues? They were Gigantic! In my mind, South America seemed a veritable hotbed of desert alien landing sites, batteries made out of rocks and copper and maybe even some human experimentation!! What other explanation could there be but alien influence??? I wanted to believe.
What a disappointment it was a few years later to read some books with somewhat less sensationalistic interpretations of the same data. Boy those writers sure didn't know how to sex-up the information like good old Daniken, but their views somehow seemed more plausible. I didn't know about Ockham's Razor at the time, but a skeptic was born.
Flash forward another decade and a half. A friend and I went to see Oliver Stone's JFK. Another obsession from childhood - old newspaper clippings and memorial books from before your birth packed away in boxes. Preserved. Must be very important. I was primed as I walked into the theatre. Stone lined em um and knocked em down. How could any intelligent person have walked out of that movie unconvinced? I came out wanting to do something. What I didn't know, but I was pissed off. At who? Our government of course - past and present. Who else could have perpetrated such a vast conspiracy? I wanted to march on Washington and force them if necessary to release the 'facts' that would prove once and for all what Stone had convinced me of. I wanted to believe.
Well, it didn't take years this time. The next morning I woke up feeling as if I had escaped from some cult brainwashing session. I was thankful I hadn't gone out and flipped over some cop car and tossed a Molotov cocktail through the smashed windows chanting '...enough lies, enough lies, impeach Reagan!!'... '...dig up Johnson's bones and put him on trial!!'
Well, I'm sitting here trying to rationalize seeing and not seeing this flick. On the one hand, I know where Moore's going with the film, and I understand most of the issues he covers, so why bother? I get lots of opinions these days. On the other hand, the medium is powerful and the documentary format even more so. Riefenstahl opened a lot of eyes I'm sure.
I guess not seeing it has finally won out. Why? I guess the issues are too important to be paying for Moore's take on it. Maybe I want the illusion at least of making up my own mind.
How bout this baby: Microsoft Cordless Phone System (700-00006) Cordless Phone.
What a disappointment.
Never could get the darn thing to work integrated with Windows... which was, um, the point I thought.
Support was non-existent.
Didn't have the heart to submit someone else to my pain and suffering by selling it on eBay.
Darn those Chinese capitalists. How dare they have the nerve to charge for their brand of 'piracy'.
Seems that most of the youth today believes in good ol communism, or as they prefer to call it, 'sharing'. I mean, what a clever way to redistribute wealth. Moby's got too much money, so let's spread the wealth. Cause that's all your really doing. The $20 your ecstasy addled, MP3 swapping, deliquent slacker fried didn't have to spend on buying the CD, can now be spent on a $10 movie ticket and a $8 bag of popcorn and coke, until he finds a way to 'share' that as well.