I had a similar complaint, though on a different basis: Kayaking straight to Australia is only 7358 miles, but Google's route is over 13,000 miles -- nearly double! As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no reason to detour through Japan, let alone pass through the well-known pirate waters of Indonesia.
True, but irrelevant -- nobody expects perfection. Accidents happen, but you're still expected to make reparations. There are plenty of reasons this case doesn't have merit (in my opinion), but "nobody's perfect" is not one of them.
Most US warships have vending machines and stores that sell anything from snacks to clothing to DVD players (depending on the size of the ship and its store), so yes, money is still used.
Pretty sure those aren't arrestable offenses (at least for values of speeding that most people do). Most people don't actually commit arrestable offenses very often, despite what the author of "Three Felonies a Day," would have us believe. Sure, it's easy to find a legitimate reason to stop anyone, but that's not the same as an arrest.
Growth is not the only way to increase shareholder value. Returning profits through dividends is another (arguably better) method, and you won't see any dividends from AAPL.
Fads can last longer than a few months. Bell bottoms lasted 15 years. That doesn't mean that a manufacturer can't re-tool when a fad ends, but the question is whether it can continue to lead the trend, or even keep up. Re-tooling and redesign takes time. I'm not sure Apple will continue to lead the fads, especially in light of the iPad (on which they seem to be betting heavily) with no track record and questionable utility/longevity, despite initial sales. I concede that I may lack the vision to see its potential: I was wrong about the iPod, but I was right about netbooks.
iPhone sales have been spectacular to be sure, but Apple is *still* a small fish in the mobile pond. I give them the nod with easy access to iTunes and the App Store, both of which generate returning sales, but I'm not sure this will sustain them for long, especially given the backlash over their walled garden. If they open up a bit, I would be more confident, but as it stands, the situation is too unpredictable.
Finally, Steve Jobs won't be around forever, and will almost certainly remain less than another decade at the helm of Apple in any event. Can the company succeed without him? That's a huge question.
I'm not risk averse, but there has to be compelling motivation to take risks, otherwise you might as well close your eyes and throw darts at the financials. I wish I had bought Apple two years ago, but I was divesting out of necessity at that time, not investing. At present, I see limited potential for a significantly higher AAPL stock price, and no dividends in sight; in other words, plenty of reasons to sell (if I had stock), but none to buy. I'm not suggesting that anyone act based on my opinions, just explaining how I see it.
Of course it matters. The last-end connection that an ISP sells is based on its backbone bandwidth, even if it's not purely BWTotal/Customers. In other words, you're not going to see 100Mbit last mile connections on a network that can barely support 6Mbit connections. Granted, you may see demand-related degradation of service, and the concepts are related, but it costs money to install headend equipment too, and ISPs aren't going to install that equipment if they can't sell connections on it either in the present or the near future -- especially when prices only come down. It's a waste of money.
I should have specified hard caps with regards to monthly bandwidth usage, not instantaneous bandwidth available. The US is one of the few countries where unlimited usage is the norm.
Not really. The US still leads among English-speaking nations (US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia -- not necessarily in that order) by a healthy margin. Further, we're 26 out of 152, which puts us in the 82nd percentile, and there are no hard caps on most US connections, which is very different than many countries, even those that outrank us in pure speed.
Additionally, average bandwidth is not purely a function of availability -- which is difficult to measure -- but also of consumer purchasing decisions. E.g., we have 50Mbit connections available where I live, but I can tell you for sure that I'm one of the few people in our neighborhood who has it. Most everyone else seems satisfied with the low or mid-end offerings. This may well be a function of price, but it's also a function of demand -- people in Country A may well value bandwidth more highly than people in Country B. One potentially contributing factor for this could be, for example, that programs are aired in Country B which are only later (if ever) shown in Country A. Same goes for software, and other bandwidth-intensive content. It could also be that content is overpriced with regard to local economies, which is typical of "legitimate" software in other-than First World countries.
At any rate, these results should be taken with a grain of salt.
1) I think it's safe to say that the portable music player as a dedicated device will cease to be relevant sometime in the near future. That is, the iPod may be the king of the hill, but I believe that hill will soon become an anthill. The iPhone almost certainly cannibalized sales from the iPod -- how many people do you know that have bought an iPod after they already had an iPhone? -- and it's only a matter of time before other phones do the same. (Same goes for dedicated GPS, I believe).
2) Microsoft's revenue may be flat, but their profits are still higher than Apple's; ~25% higher, on ~10% more revenue.
Moreover, I believe that Microsoft's position is much more stable than Apple's, because their product is essential to ~90% of the desktop and ~50% of the server market. If Microsoft went tits up, the computing world would be in disarray for years; possibly longer. Apple doesn't compete in most of MS's core products, namely Office and servers, so they're certainly not in any position to pick up the slack.
Meanwhile if Apple disappeared, MS could capitalize on the void left by nearly all of Apple's products.
I believe that MS has a far stronger market position. Its market may well be saturated, which limits growth potential, but neither is its market likely to decline appreciably in the near term. OTOH, Apple itself may not be a fad, but the devices it produces are certainly faddish, and subject to the often brutal whim of the consumer. What's popular today may be unthinkable tomorrow. All of this leads me to believe that either MS is undervalued, Apple is overvalued, or a combination of the two.
If I had to invest in these two companies, I'd put 75% in MSFT and 25% in AAPL. If I saw any path for Apple to establish dominance in any significant market, I might go 50/50. Unfortunately, I don't see the tablet becoming a pervasive fixture, and the sustainability of iPhone growth is just too uncertain; particularly given their penchant for the walled garden, the heavy lag time of expanded features (often months or even years behind competitors), and perhaps most importantly, their exclusive dealings with AT&T.
They were trying things first that if they went wrong would not make the problem worse.
And yet, initial efforts conveniently included salvaging any possible oil, regardless of its overall impact. We now know that even had one of the "capping" efforts worked they would have salvaged, at best, a tiny percentage of the overall flow. I suspect BP knew this all along, since they had cameras on the leak, and even a rudimentary analysis would have shown that the leak was far larger than the ~2,000 barrels per day that the cap would have siphoned.
At the same time, they're using dispersants which have, at best, mixed reviews from ecologists, both for this specific chemical and for the process of using dispersants in general. An oil slick on the surface is certainly an environmental catastrophe, but oil dispersed throughout the water column may turn out to be much, much worse. And it just so happens that the dispersant effectively poisons the oil, both complicating recovery and negating the utility of any oil is recovered.
Finally, they've made little more than token efforts to prevent the slick from reaching shore. Setting up floating barriers and cleaning up pelicans (that will die nonetheless) may make great vid-bites, but it does nothing to address the underlying problem. If some podunk small town politician can come up with better ideas (like dredging and creating temporary sand barriers), then it's evident to me that BP has put very little thought or energy into protecting the shoreline.
Frankly, it reminds me of a bank blowing up, but instead of looking for survivors, the owners run around grabbing as many dollars as they can and taking a flamethrower to the ones they can't reach.
I can't say for sure that their efforts haven't been well intentioned, but at the same time I haven't seen any convincing reasons to be less than skeptical.
Apple is great at a lot of things, but writing/porting applications is not one of them. It makes much more sense to extend the functionality of MS's (far superior, IMO) Visual Studio. The extensibility of VS means they don't really even need MS's cooperation or approval... which is pretty fucking ironic when you think about it.
He forbade his kids (my father included) from saying words like "heck" or "darn" because when you say that, you mean the other word. I think he was nuts.
That's the problem with a ban on profanity. If you take it to its logical conclusion, then implying the meaning of profane words is no different than using them explicitly.
That said, I don't have a problem with people who don't want their kids to use certain words, though my reasoning isn't moral; it's practical. It's important to be able to communicate effectively without resorting to profanity -- that's just the reality of the world. Using the "7 words" makes you come across as unprofessional (under most circumstances), and using the "substitute" words just makes you sound like an idiot.
There's got to be some DS/CR writers lurking on Slashdot. They cover far too many/. stories (with many of the same jokes and insights posted in the comments, though never verbatim) for it to be a coincidence.
You could really change that to 20 years. Cell phones in 1990 were still cumbersome and expensive, and the Internet didn't change a whole lot between 1980 and 1990. With regards to the Internet, the biggest things the 80s gave us was growth, in both nodes and bandwidth. While the Internet was slowly opened up to commercial entities as early as 1988, it wasn't until the 90s that the ball really got rolling with regards to ISPs and private individuals getting access.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. In Denver they skipped the commercials in the Lost season finale to update the status on several tornado watches.
Tornado warnings (and other imminent emergency warnings) are different, and by federal law must be aired regardless of what content it interrupts.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc114
American or European?
I had a similar complaint, though on a different basis: Kayaking straight to Australia is only 7358 miles, but Google's route is over 13,000 miles -- nearly double! As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no reason to detour through Japan, let alone pass through the well-known pirate waters of Indonesia.
True, but irrelevant -- nobody expects perfection. Accidents happen, but you're still expected to make reparations. There are plenty of reasons this case doesn't have merit (in my opinion), but "nobody's perfect" is not one of them.
Nice order of magnitude increase over the actual 5,000 number you did there. Not to mention it's divided over (presumably) many ISPs.
Most US warships have vending machines and stores that sell anything from snacks to clothing to DVD players (depending on the size of the ship and its store), so yes, money is still used.
I don't care if it's encrypted, as long as it's WEP.
Reading fail.
Actually, FTP is quite a bit older than USENET...
::Shakes fist in the air::
Damn you, NPS!!!
Pretty sure those aren't arrestable offenses (at least for values of speeding that most people do). Most people don't actually commit arrestable offenses very often, despite what the author of "Three Felonies a Day," would have us believe. Sure, it's easy to find a legitimate reason to stop anyone, but that's not the same as an arrest.
Growth is not the only way to increase shareholder value. Returning profits through dividends is another (arguably better) method, and you won't see any dividends from AAPL.
Fads can last longer than a few months. Bell bottoms lasted 15 years. That doesn't mean that a manufacturer can't re-tool when a fad ends, but the question is whether it can continue to lead the trend, or even keep up. Re-tooling and redesign takes time. I'm not sure Apple will continue to lead the fads, especially in light of the iPad (on which they seem to be betting heavily) with no track record and questionable utility/longevity, despite initial sales. I concede that I may lack the vision to see its potential: I was wrong about the iPod, but I was right about netbooks.
iPhone sales have been spectacular to be sure, but Apple is *still* a small fish in the mobile pond. I give them the nod with easy access to iTunes and the App Store, both of which generate returning sales, but I'm not sure this will sustain them for long, especially given the backlash over their walled garden. If they open up a bit, I would be more confident, but as it stands, the situation is too unpredictable.
Finally, Steve Jobs won't be around forever, and will almost certainly remain less than another decade at the helm of Apple in any event. Can the company succeed without him? That's a huge question.
I'm not risk averse, but there has to be compelling motivation to take risks, otherwise you might as well close your eyes and throw darts at the financials. I wish I had bought Apple two years ago, but I was divesting out of necessity at that time, not investing. At present, I see limited potential for a significantly higher AAPL stock price, and no dividends in sight; in other words, plenty of reasons to sell (if I had stock), but none to buy. I'm not suggesting that anyone act based on my opinions, just explaining how I see it.
Of course it matters. The last-end connection that an ISP sells is based on its backbone bandwidth, even if it's not purely BWTotal/Customers. In other words, you're not going to see 100Mbit last mile connections on a network that can barely support 6Mbit connections. Granted, you may see demand-related degradation of service, and the concepts are related, but it costs money to install headend equipment too, and ISPs aren't going to install that equipment if they can't sell connections on it either in the present or the near future -- especially when prices only come down. It's a waste of money.
I should have specified hard caps with regards to monthly bandwidth usage, not instantaneous bandwidth available. The US is one of the few countries where unlimited usage is the norm.
Not really. The US still leads among English-speaking nations (US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia -- not necessarily in that order) by a healthy margin. Further, we're 26 out of 152, which puts us in the 82nd percentile, and there are no hard caps on most US connections, which is very different than many countries, even those that outrank us in pure speed.
Additionally, average bandwidth is not purely a function of availability -- which is difficult to measure -- but also of consumer purchasing decisions. E.g., we have 50Mbit connections available where I live, but I can tell you for sure that I'm one of the few people in our neighborhood who has it. Most everyone else seems satisfied with the low or mid-end offerings. This may well be a function of price, but it's also a function of demand -- people in Country A may well value bandwidth more highly than people in Country B. One potentially contributing factor for this could be, for example, that programs are aired in Country B which are only later (if ever) shown in Country A. Same goes for software, and other bandwidth-intensive content. It could also be that content is overpriced with regard to local economies, which is typical of "legitimate" software in other-than First World countries.
At any rate, these results should be taken with a grain of salt.
PowerShell is the recommended path, but VBScript works too. Either of those are the obvious choices where Windows machines are concerned.
No worries, all the more beer for the rest of us.
1) I think it's safe to say that the portable music player as a dedicated device will cease to be relevant sometime in the near future. That is, the iPod may be the king of the hill, but I believe that hill will soon become an anthill. The iPhone almost certainly cannibalized sales from the iPod -- how many people do you know that have bought an iPod after they already had an iPhone? -- and it's only a matter of time before other phones do the same. (Same goes for dedicated GPS, I believe).
2) Microsoft's revenue may be flat, but their profits are still higher than Apple's; ~25% higher, on ~10% more revenue.
Moreover, I believe that Microsoft's position is much more stable than Apple's, because their product is essential to ~90% of the desktop and ~50% of the server market. If Microsoft went tits up, the computing world would be in disarray for years; possibly longer. Apple doesn't compete in most of MS's core products, namely Office and servers, so they're certainly not in any position to pick up the slack.
Meanwhile if Apple disappeared, MS could capitalize on the void left by nearly all of Apple's products.
I believe that MS has a far stronger market position. Its market may well be saturated, which limits growth potential, but neither is its market likely to decline appreciably in the near term. OTOH, Apple itself may not be a fad, but the devices it produces are certainly faddish, and subject to the often brutal whim of the consumer. What's popular today may be unthinkable tomorrow. All of this leads me to believe that either MS is undervalued, Apple is overvalued, or a combination of the two.
If I had to invest in these two companies, I'd put 75% in MSFT and 25% in AAPL. If I saw any path for Apple to establish dominance in any significant market, I might go 50/50. Unfortunately, I don't see the tablet becoming a pervasive fixture, and the sustainability of iPhone growth is just too uncertain; particularly given their penchant for the walled garden, the heavy lag time of expanded features (often months or even years behind competitors), and perhaps most importantly, their exclusive dealings with AT&T.
They were trying things first that if they went wrong would not make the problem worse.
And yet, initial efforts conveniently included salvaging any possible oil, regardless of its overall impact. We now know that even had one of the "capping" efforts worked they would have salvaged, at best, a tiny percentage of the overall flow. I suspect BP knew this all along, since they had cameras on the leak, and even a rudimentary analysis would have shown that the leak was far larger than the ~2,000 barrels per day that the cap would have siphoned.
At the same time, they're using dispersants which have, at best, mixed reviews from ecologists, both for this specific chemical and for the process of using dispersants in general. An oil slick on the surface is certainly an environmental catastrophe, but oil dispersed throughout the water column may turn out to be much, much worse. And it just so happens that the dispersant effectively poisons the oil, both complicating recovery and negating the utility of any oil is recovered.
Finally, they've made little more than token efforts to prevent the slick from reaching shore. Setting up floating barriers and cleaning up pelicans (that will die nonetheless) may make great vid-bites, but it does nothing to address the underlying problem. If some podunk small town politician can come up with better ideas (like dredging and creating temporary sand barriers), then it's evident to me that BP has put very little thought or energy into protecting the shoreline.
Frankly, it reminds me of a bank blowing up, but instead of looking for survivors, the owners run around grabbing as many dollars as they can and taking a flamethrower to the ones they can't reach.
I can't say for sure that their efforts haven't been well intentioned, but at the same time I haven't seen any convincing reasons to be less than skeptical.
Three words: iTunes for Windows.
Apple is great at a lot of things, but writing/porting applications is not one of them. It makes much more sense to extend the functionality of MS's (far superior, IMO) Visual Studio. The extensibility of VS means they don't really even need MS's cooperation or approval... which is pretty fucking ironic when you think about it.
All I saw was https://login.yourbank.com/?login=********&password=********
He forbade his kids (my father included) from saying words like "heck" or "darn" because when you say that, you mean the other word. I think he was nuts.
That's the problem with a ban on profanity. If you take it to its logical conclusion, then implying the meaning of profane words is no different than using them explicitly.
That said, I don't have a problem with people who don't want their kids to use certain words, though my reasoning isn't moral; it's practical. It's important to be able to communicate effectively without resorting to profanity -- that's just the reality of the world. Using the "7 words" makes you come across as unprofessional (under most circumstances), and using the "substitute" words just makes you sound like an idiot.
There's got to be some DS/CR writers lurking on Slashdot. They cover far too many /. stories (with many of the same jokes and insights posted in the comments, though never verbatim) for it to be a coincidence.
You could really change that to 20 years. Cell phones in 1990 were still cumbersome and expensive, and the Internet didn't change a whole lot between 1980 and 1990. With regards to the Internet, the biggest things the 80s gave us was growth, in both nodes and bandwidth. While the Internet was slowly opened up to commercial entities as early as 1988, it wasn't until the 90s that the ball really got rolling with regards to ISPs and private individuals getting access.