I don't see the argument that Taiwan needs Microsoft to publicly open the Windows' source code so that Taiwan may add custom firewall software.
Why can't Taiwan privately contract with Microsoft to add such capabilities? Does Taiwan seriously want to use Windows for it's most secure information, and therefore need to know all the internals to Windows? And to release the details to the masses? That seems a bit unrealistic.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of open source. But this one sounds more like industry politics than a technical shortcoming.
I say open up Window's source code in order to curb Microsoft's monopolistic stranglehold on business and individuals and government. Not to add "custom firewall software for Taiwan".
Yay, I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm not an ANT trasher - ANT was a good attempt at replacing "make" with an XML-based description, and ANT has some pretty nice extentions.
Alas, now I see that "make" is pretty darn good at what it does. And I see that ANT's XML-based solution to "make"s issues is far less than elegant.
OK, now I understand that "hard-core" Linux users cheered...
"for the fact that their [Mircosoft's] product blends handwriting recognition with Windows applications"
Hmmm, I can see people being impressed by handwriting recognition, so I assume that it's many many steps up above the stuff in the old Newton. Did you try it out? How did it do with your handwriting?
Other than using handwriting as an input device, was there anything else that led to cheers?
It was mentioned that any app can take advantage of this. Does that mean I can just plunk in my old Word '97 and have it use all these annotation and handwriting features? Or does my app have to be modified to take advantage of these features?
I kind of assumed that any future tablet product would be capable of handwriting recognition... hopefully better recognition than that of PDAs of today and yesteryear. And I kind of also assumed that it'd be fairly easy to annotate documents with marks, like the Newton did. And being a Microsoft product, I assumed that it'd run MS-Office.
Can someone who was there explain this a little better? Did anyone get their hands on the hardware and take it for a spin?
By the way, what was the name of the lecture series? Is there a web site? Since this was sponsored by CM, there must be... feel free to email it to me or post it here.
Microsoft just finished a week-long series of lectures and demos at my university
What university?
the product that really stole the show was the Tablet PC. I was in a room with probably 150 hardcore linux users, and it seemed to me that the demonstration just floored them (the entire lecture hall CHEERED a Microsoft product).
What did they cheer for, other than nebulous "amazement?"
I believe that Microsoft's own online hype literature is insufficient in describing just how powerful their Tablet concept is.
What hype are you refering to, and exactly how is their "hype literature" insufficient?
Oh, and the input stylus is electromagnetic, not pressure-sensing
How is that better? Is an electromagnetic stylus a requirement of the Microsoft technology?
ANY document (not just MS) can be annotated
Can I annotate OpenOffice documents?
the journal software is AMAZING in its power and flexibility.
What exactly does it do that's powerful and flexible?
More details please! I don't feel the amazement yet - perhaps you could tell us all why we should be amazed! Then we'll love you!
Yeah, I agree - your points are all sound to me (oops, a pun!). I'm sure it's a very valuable service to many people.
But I think that number of people might be pretty small. To me, it's great for people who have poor FM radio service AND who like music a lot AND who spend a lot of time driving AND who have the money and desire to shell out an extra $100+ per year.
Too bad, 'cause technically I think it's pretty cool. It's just that the business model behind it seems a bit, um, lacking.
Hopefully they'll be able to reorganize in a way that makes the service at least break even.
They should get the system in rental cars so more people can "discover" the service. (if they haven't done that already, of course!)
1. I mostly listen to the radio when I'm in my car. Since I live in a big city, I'm rarely in my car.
2. And when I am in my car, I listen to traffic, weather, or my own music collection or local radio.
3. The exception is long distance trips. Perhaps one multi-hour drive a month.
4. At home, I have a big music collection. Stuff I actually bought over the years. (Don't blame MP3s in my case). I also have digital TV, with it's music channels. Plus a collection of reasonable local radio stations (and many more unreasonable ones)
So! Someone has to remind me why I should spend $$$ for this service. I can see why some people would spring for it. Just not me.
In fact, my eth0 and eth1 (both 3Com 3c509's) share the same MAC. eth0's mac address is via hardware; eth1's via "ifconfig eth0 hw ether aa:dd:rr:ee:ss"
Just because the MAC is "set at the factory" doesn't mean that you can't play with it!
Happily, my eth0 and eth1 are connected to different networks (eth0 is internal, eth1 is on my ISP's side). So no conflicts.
Oh yeah, I totally agree that there are still Mac bigots out there. It's just that the debate kinda of lost it's edge. The classic Mac debate is "I have this nice & pretty GUI on a totally overpriced machine" versus "Mice and GUIs suck".
That debate is dead. Apple prices are in line for quality, name-brand computers. And most everyone (not everyone) believes in the GUI and Mice and integrated motherboards and funky case design.
Of course there are other things to debate about, but the classic "cult attitude" is mostly gone, 'cause now very few really think that Macs are a weird computer with mice and graphics and this "desktop" thing and etc.
The debate is now all about how the software business works... but even there, Apple is much closer to the future than Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft has a classic business model that they're trying to hold onto with both hands... where Apple is easing towards openness (although certainly not nearly as open as they could be).
On a side note, my office is in the middle of switching from Windows 2000 to Redhat 8.0. Wow, so far no one is unhappy. I think the biggest complaint is regarding the availability of Visio - everyone seems to like Visio. No one misses IE, Outlook, or etc.
You're right that Apple invested in the ideas and efforts of others and propelled the concepts into the marketplace.
You're wrong that Apple "stole" these ideas. That sounds like Microsoft talk. Apple just took the good, publically-available ideas and brought them to home and business users.... no IP theft was involved, as far as I know. Alas, as we all know, Xerox (and Digital and...) were never quite able to bring their (still) amazing developments to the marketplace.
Apple took the risk of betting their business on these ideas. Some failed (Newton), some succeeded (the desktop paradigm).
Microsoft is a little different. In general, Microsoft has taken good ideas that other people have already shown were "safe" in the marketplace. Like the GUI. Like scalable typefaces. Like Microsoft Bob.
OK, not Microsoft Bob. I guess that was their attempt at innovation. Oh well! But not to slam Microsoft too much - they do deliver high-quality software, and they have been innovative on some fronts - just not on the order of magnitude of the other industry leaders.
I have to say that I think that the Cult of Macintosh is pretty much dead.
Yeah, there are still Mac fanatics, but just like the suffragettes, the Cult of Macintosh faded when it won.
The Macintosh successfully delivered the GUI desktop paradigm to the masses. After that, well, anyone applauding Windows 95+ was also supporting the ideals that the Macintosh was successfully promoting into the marketplace - like it or not.
Sure, the Mac had some really really dark days... mostly in the late 80's, early 90's when that Pepsi guy was pretending to run the place.
But again Apple has taken the industry to a new level, with computers that push design and function, and with a real, extendable, fairly open, standards-friendly OS behind it.
In any case, the war is over. Maybe Apple didn't win all the love and money. But it propelled the industry forward on many, many fronts.
Thank goodness for comapies like Apple pushing innovation into the marketplace. Maybe someday Microsoft will be able to do the same.
Yay! It's about time. I've been in dicussions with my boss about such accessibility issues for months. He's all for making it happen, but refuses to allocate anyone to actually do it. I estimate it'll cost about three days of time for one person to make our site very accessible.
What's the big deal?
Instead we are:
- alientaing a community
- losing sales to a community (although small)
- letting crap HTML out the door... all for 3 days of effort. We're a very small company, but let me tell you, 3 days of effort is still almost nothing.
One problem is the graphic designer. He loves totally pretty, graphically-intense shit. Makes it all unusable over a dial-up. Makes it hard for ME to navigate. But it -looks- good, so everyone assumes that it IS good.
if I made a EULA that said you were no longer allowed to own a firearm if you used my product, it would be tossed to the wind in a second.
How so? I will contract with you if you do not own a firearm. If you do own a firearm, I will not contract with you.
What's so illegal about that? I am not the US government, but a private person. Unless the discriminatory action is clearly specified in law, I can discriminate against you all I wish.
I don't think there is a law that says I, as a private individual, can't discriminate against gun owners. If there is, please let me know. And please don't bother to quote the constitution - that's for discrimination by the Federal gov't.
At this point, Warner can do one of two things to survive: (1) change their business model, or (2) "go to war" against the many innovations that are making their business model obsolete. So it doesn't surprise me that they use the term "warfare".
It would appear that Warner is not capable of significant change. And that's easy to understand - Warner is a very old company, stuck in it's way, and hasn't had any ground-shaking innovation in the past 50 years. When you feel like crap, it's more satisfying to "go to war" than to intellegently address a serious issue.
It's kind of like Apple in the early 80's. Apple could have stuck with the comfortable Apple II line, or change. Apple changed and propelled the entire marketplace forward.
It's like IBM in the 90's... it could continue to be a big-iron shop, or change. It changed. IBM is much more of a service oriented company, embrassing the likes of Unix, Linux, and Java. They leveraged their former glory with new innovations.
But remember, like them or not, Apple and IBM have ALWAYS been innovators. Warner is more like US Steel in the 80's. US Steel could have continued to be an old-school steel producer, or change to react to new steel producing innovations happening overseas. US Steel decided to stay the course, and the steel industry in the USA is still plumetting and out-of-control.
Really? I just bought a Dell Latitude x200 last night... for my brother-in-law who isn't interested in "switching".
I did some shopping around first - and I just simply couldn't find a laptop as nice as the Mac titanium laptop... light, thin, big screen, built-in DVD. The Latitude was the closest I could find for the money.
But unlike the Mac, the Latitude has no built-in-DVD and a much smaller display. The performance of the Dell by no mean screams over the Mac (The Dell is a 800mhz P3... not even a P4).
And the price of the Dell with the DVD/CD-RW and the other basics isn't any better than the Mac price. Really.
For a laptop, I like thin & light... I don't want to lug around a big thing on business trips. Unless the market changes radically in the next month, my next laptop purchase will be a Mac. For the first time.
Right, it is economics. But part of the equation is confidence in their own products.
If they believe that their products were going to be more reliable, then there would be no need to harm the ecomonic advantage of having a reasonable 3 year warranty.
However, if they believe that their products are going to be less reliable, then it may make economic sense to reduce their warranty. Despite the loss of sales, they'd make out by having fewer repairs... and more "replacement" sales.
Of course, some states don't permit this nonsense of strict warranty limitations. So if it has been out of warranty for only 3 months, I suggest you call them up and give them ask for a free replacement. After all, that's a right you have as a consumer.
And you're right -had drive prices have fallen a lot over the past 10 years. But then again, sales are way way way up, and mfg costs are way way way down. They're a commodity now.
This isn't an attempt for Microsoft to sell PCs or Windows.
Instead, this is an attempt to gain lobby support from MPAA/RIAA... so that congress can bless the "proven Microsoft Way" and force the Microsoft "technology" onto the rest of us.
It all comes back to the Microsoft strategy - once you're locked in, you can complain... but you're still a paying customer...
My former employer, a very large areospace company, was at one time very very much against any software that wasn't back by a "stable corporation".
The excuse was that if something went wrong, my company could sue the pants off the software provider. Of course, they almost never did that - instead, they just wouldn't pay the bills until the provider complied with company demands.
Enter terminal emulator software. The popular 3270 emulator cost about $500+ per desktop. And with 10,000's of desktops, that was... um, expensive. So I started my own little cost/benefit analysis. We could buy a shareware product for $5 per seat, and it was very robust and served 99+% of the users (except for mainframe sysadmins, of course!).
And the savings was amazing. We rolled out the product slowly. Everyone was happy. In the end, everyone used the product.
This one little step put us on the road towards purchasing more shareware. Soon afterwards, we did the same kind of argument with freeware - and won.
Conclusion: Start with something simple that you can back away from... just in case it doesn't work out. Perform a cost/benefit analysis. Purchase a product if it's the right decision - don't let "free" blind you. Write white papers for management. Counter industry FUD "reports"... as they're often BS that are easily attacked.
I've all but stopped using Internet email for anything important. Over 90% of the mail I receive is spam.
Filtering is great, but spam still gets thru (because I traditionally didn't want to loose messages due to overly-aggressive filtering).
Now, when you email me directly, you get a message telling you to call me if it's important.
Isn't curious that every ISP out there spouts off about how good their SPAM filtering is? Doesn't congress see this as a threat to business? Where is the president now? Off on a month-long vacation - clearly needed to clean up his own email box.
Spammers ruined any possible business benefits of email. At least for me.
PS - even my poor old Dad gets a ton of messages about teen sluts and crap like that. This just isn't right.
I love these guys... they're so honest. But their "principles" need some help...:
"Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences"
Maybe they could say "Please don't judge our product on the license agreement! Our license is designed to maximize our stranglehold on you... and if you disallow our software due to it's license, well, we won't be able to take advantage of you".
"Promote broad availability of government funded research"
Perhaps instead they could say "We'd like to package up taxpayer-funded research and sell it back to the tax payers! All for profit! Please don't take that away from us - because we'd hate to have to pay for more research."
"Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards"
Perhaps they could say "Don't place standards on us, because we want to try to monopolize the industry. If the standards are open source, how can we lock in our customers?"
"Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections"
Maybe it'd be better to say "Don't weaken our intellectual property, because we spent so much money on research! We need to recover our research burden. Of course, much of the research came through tax-payer funded research grants, but we still want it all. After all, we're in it to make as much money as we possibly can, and a legal monopoly is our best approach."
Yeah, a lot of projects are initially turned down for business investment ONLY because they suck.
You see, a business project needs to be shown to be profitable (in the short or long term), and if the original business plan didn't drive that point home, well, it'd be rejected by management. Plus the original business plan would have had to fit into Sony's core business model. If not (and this plan did not!), the plan would have to be much more detailed and robust.
It isn't that management is always stupid - most executives get dozens of business plans thrown in front of them every week. They have to pick and choose the most likely to succeed.
After all, it doesn't make anyone look good if $10 million was "lost" in a business plan that most senior executives would laugh at.
It's kind of like FedEx. We all know that business plan only got a "C" at Harvard Business School. But the fact is, it should have gotten an "F". As a business plan, it sucked. Sure, in the end it turned out to be a wildly successful and profitable business... but the initial business plan could be summed up as "likely to be a failure".
It seems like the cable industry has a great incentive to commonize the set-top cable box. With equipment manufacturers coming and going over the years, with diverging equipment standards, why didn't the cable industry collective deliver a conclusion a decade ago?
Clearly they were able to do so with cable modems (DOCSIS). I know the whole cable modem buiness was on 3 or 5 years old, so maybe that was the difference.
I think a study of their failure to get their act together would help other industries (like the wireless telephone industry) figure out what the heck they're doing wrong. Clearly, commonality of standards greatly lowers infrastructure costs. And CATV and Wireless Telco wants to minimize device cost, 'cause they sell service.
Does some business school have a (good) case study that discusses this issue? If these business schools are worth beans, someone has studied this before and published it in a journal. Someone post a URL!
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I don't see the argument that Taiwan needs Microsoft to publicly open the Windows' source code so that Taiwan may add custom firewall software.
Why can't Taiwan privately contract with Microsoft to add such capabilities? Does Taiwan seriously want to use Windows for it's most secure information, and therefore need to know all the internals to Windows? And to release the details to the masses? That seems a bit unrealistic.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of open source. But this one sounds more like industry politics than a technical shortcoming.
I say open up Window's source code in order to curb Microsoft's monopolistic stranglehold on business and individuals and government. Not to add "custom firewall software for Taiwan".
Yay, I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm not an ANT trasher - ANT was a good attempt at replacing "make" with an XML-based description, and ANT has some pretty nice extentions.
Alas, now I see that "make" is pretty darn good at what it does. And I see that ANT's XML-based solution to "make"s issues is far less than elegant.
OK, now I understand that "hard-core" Linux users cheered...
"for the fact that their [Mircosoft's] product blends handwriting recognition with Windows applications"
Hmmm, I can see people being impressed by handwriting recognition, so I assume that it's many many steps up above the stuff in the old Newton. Did you try it out? How did it do with your handwriting?
Other than using handwriting as an input device, was there anything else that led to cheers?
It was mentioned that any app can take advantage of this. Does that mean I can just plunk in my old Word '97 and have it use all these annotation and handwriting features? Or does my app have to be modified to take advantage of these features?
I kind of assumed that any future tablet product would be capable of handwriting recognition... hopefully better recognition than that of PDAs of today and yesteryear. And I kind of also assumed that it'd be fairly easy to annotate documents with marks, like the Newton did. And being a Microsoft product, I assumed that it'd run MS-Office.
Can someone who was there explain this a little better? Did anyone get their hands on the hardware and take it for a spin?
By the way, what was the name of the lecture series? Is there a web site? Since this was sponsored by CM, there must be... feel free to email it to me or post it here.
This is super exciting! Just a few questions!
Microsoft just finished a week-long series of lectures and demos at my university
What university?
the product that really stole the show was the Tablet PC. I was in a room with probably 150 hardcore linux users, and it seemed to me that the demonstration just floored them (the entire lecture hall CHEERED a Microsoft product).
What did they cheer for, other than nebulous "amazement?"
I believe that Microsoft's own online hype literature is insufficient in describing just how powerful their Tablet concept is.
What hype are you refering to, and exactly how is their "hype literature" insufficient?
Oh, and the input stylus is electromagnetic, not pressure-sensing
How is that better? Is an electromagnetic stylus a requirement of the Microsoft technology?
ANY document (not just MS) can be annotated
Can I annotate OpenOffice documents?
the journal software is AMAZING in its power and flexibility.
What exactly does it do that's powerful and flexible?
More details please! I don't feel the amazement yet - perhaps you could tell us all why we should be amazed! Then we'll love you!
Yeah, I agree - your points are all sound to me (oops, a pun!). I'm sure it's a very valuable service to many people.
But I think that number of people might be pretty small. To me, it's great for people who have poor FM radio service AND who like music a lot AND who spend a lot of time driving AND who have the money and desire to shell out an extra $100+ per year.
Too bad, 'cause technically I think it's pretty cool. It's just that the business model behind it seems a bit, um, lacking.
Hopefully they'll be able to reorganize in a way that makes the service at least break even.
They should get the system in rental cars so more people can "discover" the service. (if they haven't done that already, of course!)
1. I mostly listen to the radio when I'm in my car. Since I live in a big city, I'm rarely in my car.
2. And when I am in my car, I listen to traffic, weather, or my own music collection or local radio.
3. The exception is long distance trips. Perhaps one multi-hour drive a month.
4. At home, I have a big music collection. Stuff I actually bought over the years. (Don't blame MP3s in my case). I also have digital TV, with it's music channels. Plus a collection of reasonable local radio stations (and many more unreasonable ones)
So! Someone has to remind me why I should spend $$$ for this service. I can see why some people would spring for it. Just not me.
Damn, it's snowing... there goes summer...
In fact, my eth0 and eth1 (both 3Com 3c509's) share the same MAC. eth0's mac address is via hardware; eth1's via "ifconfig eth0 hw ether aa:dd:rr:ee:ss"
Just because the MAC is "set at the factory" doesn't mean that you can't play with it!
Happily, my eth0 and eth1 are connected to different networks (eth0 is internal, eth1 is on my ISP's side). So no conflicts.
Oh yeah, I totally agree that there are still Mac bigots out there. It's just that the debate kinda of lost it's edge. The classic Mac debate is "I have this nice & pretty GUI on a totally overpriced machine" versus "Mice and GUIs suck".
That debate is dead. Apple prices are in line for quality, name-brand computers. And most everyone (not everyone) believes in the GUI and Mice and integrated motherboards and funky case design.
Of course there are other things to debate about, but the classic "cult attitude" is mostly gone, 'cause now very few really think that Macs are a weird computer with mice and graphics and this "desktop" thing and etc.
The debate is now all about how the software business works... but even there, Apple is much closer to the future than Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft has a classic business model that they're trying to hold onto with both hands... where Apple is easing towards openness (although certainly not nearly as open as they could be).
On a side note, my office is in the middle of switching from Windows 2000 to Redhat 8.0. Wow, so far no one is unhappy. I think the biggest complaint is regarding the availability of Visio - everyone seems to like Visio. No one misses IE, Outlook, or etc.
Too bad Microsoft owns Visio now...
You're right and wrong.
...) were never quite able to bring their (still) amazing developments to the marketplace.
You're right that Apple invested in the ideas and efforts of others and propelled the concepts into the marketplace.
You're wrong that Apple "stole" these ideas. That sounds like Microsoft talk. Apple just took the good, publically-available ideas and brought them to home and business users.... no IP theft was involved, as far as I know. Alas, as we all know, Xerox (and Digital and
Apple took the risk of betting their business on these ideas. Some failed (Newton), some succeeded (the desktop paradigm).
Microsoft is a little different. In general, Microsoft has taken good ideas that other people have already shown were "safe" in the marketplace. Like the GUI. Like scalable typefaces. Like Microsoft Bob.
OK, not Microsoft Bob. I guess that was their attempt at innovation. Oh well! But not to slam Microsoft too much - they do deliver high-quality software, and they have been innovative on some fronts - just not on the order of magnitude of the other industry leaders.
I have to say that I think that the Cult of Macintosh is pretty much dead.
Yeah, there are still Mac fanatics, but just like the suffragettes, the Cult of Macintosh faded when it won.
The Macintosh successfully delivered the GUI desktop paradigm to the masses. After that, well, anyone applauding Windows 95+ was also supporting the ideals that the Macintosh was successfully promoting into the marketplace - like it or not.
Sure, the Mac had some really really dark days... mostly in the late 80's, early 90's when that Pepsi guy was pretending to run the place.
But again Apple has taken the industry to a new level, with computers that push design and function, and with a real, extendable, fairly open, standards-friendly OS behind it.
In any case, the war is over. Maybe Apple didn't win all the love and money. But it propelled the industry forward on many, many fronts.
Thank goodness for comapies like Apple pushing innovation into the marketplace. Maybe someday Microsoft will be able to do the same.
Nah, they have no incentive to do that.
Wow, sounds like a great way to mistakenly kill someone.
She must be real fucking proud.
Faculty don't live in the real world. She's a great example, thanks for helping my cause! I hope her car rusted.
Yay! It's about time. I've been in dicussions with my boss about such accessibility issues for months. He's all for making it happen, but refuses to allocate anyone to actually do it. I estimate it'll cost about three days of time for one person to make our site very accessible.
... all for 3 days of effort. We're a very small company, but let me tell you, 3 days of effort is still almost nothing.
What's the big deal?
Instead we are:
- alientaing a community
- losing sales to a community (although small)
- letting crap HTML out the door
One problem is the graphic designer. He loves totally pretty, graphically-intense shit. Makes it all unusable over a dial-up. Makes it hard for ME to navigate. But it -looks- good, so everyone assumes that it IS good.
if I made a EULA that said you were no longer allowed to own a firearm if you used my product, it would be tossed to the wind in a second.
How so? I will contract with you if you do not own a firearm. If you do own a firearm, I will not contract with you.
What's so illegal about that? I am not the US government, but a private person. Unless the discriminatory action is clearly specified in law, I can discriminate against you all I wish.
I don't think there is a law that says I, as a private individual, can't discriminate against gun owners. If there is, please let me know. And please don't bother to quote the constitution - that's for discrimination by the Federal gov't.
At this point, Warner can do one of two things to survive: (1) change their business model, or (2) "go to war" against the many innovations that are making their business model obsolete. So it doesn't surprise me that they use the term "warfare".
It would appear that Warner is not capable of significant change. And that's easy to understand - Warner is a very old company, stuck in it's way, and hasn't had any ground-shaking innovation in the past 50 years. When you feel like crap, it's more satisfying to "go to war" than to intellegently address a serious issue.
It's kind of like Apple in the early 80's. Apple could have stuck with the comfortable Apple II line, or change. Apple changed and propelled the entire marketplace forward.
It's like IBM in the 90's... it could continue to be a big-iron shop, or change. It changed. IBM is much more of a service oriented company, embrassing the likes of Unix, Linux, and Java. They leveraged their former glory with new innovations.
But remember, like them or not, Apple and IBM have ALWAYS been innovators. Warner is more like US Steel in the 80's. US Steel could have continued to be an old-school steel producer, or change to react to new steel producing innovations happening overseas. US Steel decided to stay the course, and the steel industry in the USA is still plumetting and out-of-control.
Warner has chosen the path of US Steel.
Really? I just bought a Dell Latitude x200 last night... for my brother-in-law who isn't interested in "switching".
I did some shopping around first - and I just simply couldn't find a laptop as nice as the Mac titanium laptop... light, thin, big screen, built-in DVD. The Latitude was the closest I could find for the money.
But unlike the Mac, the Latitude has no built-in-DVD and a much smaller display. The performance of the Dell by no mean screams over the Mac (The Dell is a 800mhz P3... not even a P4).
And the price of the Dell with the DVD/CD-RW and the other basics isn't any better than the Mac price. Really.
For a laptop, I like thin & light... I don't want to lug around a big thing on business trips. Unless the market changes radically in the next month, my next laptop purchase will be a Mac. For the first time.
There is no need to have applause for anyone who leaves their employer and then bashes them publically.
There is no need to applause an employer who publicly bashes a former employee.
I wouldn't hire him if I thought he'd later be a liability. Sounds like he's being a liability to RedHat.
Right, it is economics. But part of the equation is confidence in their own products.
If they believe that their products were going to be more reliable, then there would be no need to harm the ecomonic advantage of having a reasonable 3 year warranty.
However, if they believe that their products are going to be less reliable, then it may make economic sense to reduce their warranty. Despite the loss of sales, they'd make out by having fewer repairs... and more "replacement" sales.
Of course, some states don't permit this nonsense of strict warranty limitations. So if it has been out of warranty for only 3 months, I suggest you call them up and give them ask for a free replacement. After all, that's a right you have as a consumer.
And you're right -had drive prices have fallen a lot over the past 10 years. But then again, sales are way way way up, and mfg costs are way way way down. They're a commodity now.
I'm very sad to totally agree with your analysis.
... so that congress can bless the "proven Microsoft Way" and force the Microsoft "technology" onto the rest of us.
This isn't an attempt for Microsoft to sell PCs or Windows.
Instead, this is an attempt to gain lobby support from MPAA/RIAA
It all comes back to the Microsoft strategy - once you're locked in, you can complain... but you're still a paying customer...
Ah, your mom doesn't let you unplug stuff yet, eh?
I particularly liked this point:
"The AMD Opteron is designed to be scalable, reliable and compatible, which can result in lower total cost of ownership."
Gee, the whole article sounds like a lame press release. I want the real low down, not a marketing piece!
My former employer, a very large areospace company, was at one time very very much against any software that wasn't back by a "stable corporation".
... just in case it doesn't work out. Perform a cost/benefit analysis. Purchase a product if it's the right decision - don't let "free" blind you. Write white papers for management. Counter industry FUD "reports" ... as they're often BS that are easily attacked.
The excuse was that if something went wrong, my company could sue the pants off the software provider. Of course, they almost never did that - instead, they just wouldn't pay the bills until the provider complied with company demands.
Enter terminal emulator software. The popular 3270 emulator cost about $500+ per desktop. And with 10,000's of desktops, that was... um, expensive. So I started my own little cost/benefit analysis. We could buy a shareware product for $5 per seat, and it was very robust and served 99+% of the users (except for mainframe sysadmins, of course!).
And the savings was amazing. We rolled out the product slowly. Everyone was happy. In the end, everyone used the product.
This one little step put us on the road towards purchasing more shareware. Soon afterwards, we did the same kind of argument with freeware - and won.
Conclusion: Start with something simple that you can back away from
I've all but stopped using Internet email for anything important. Over 90% of the mail I receive is spam.
Filtering is great, but spam still gets thru (because I traditionally didn't want to loose messages due to overly-aggressive filtering).
Now, when you email me directly, you get a message telling you to call me if it's important.
Isn't curious that every ISP out there spouts off about how good their SPAM filtering is? Doesn't congress see this as a threat to business? Where is the president now? Off on a month-long vacation - clearly needed to clean up his own email box.
Spammers ruined any possible business benefits of email. At least for me.
PS - even my poor old Dad gets a ton of messages about teen sluts and crap like that. This just isn't right.
I love these guys... they're so honest. But their "principles" need some help...:
"Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences"
Maybe they could say "Please don't judge our product on the license agreement! Our license is designed to maximize our stranglehold on you... and if you disallow our software due to it's license, well, we won't be able to take advantage of you".
"Promote broad availability of government funded research"
Perhaps instead they could say "We'd like to package up taxpayer-funded research and sell it back to the tax payers! All for profit! Please don't take that away from us - because we'd hate to have to pay for more research."
"Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards"
Perhaps they could say "Don't place standards on us, because we want to try to monopolize the industry. If the standards are open source, how can we lock in our customers?"
"Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections"
Maybe it'd be better to say "Don't weaken our intellectual property, because we spent so much money on research! We need to recover our research burden. Of course, much of the research came through tax-payer funded research grants, but we still want it all. After all, we're in it to make as much money as we possibly can, and a legal monopoly is our best approach."
Yeah, a lot of projects are initially turned down for business investment ONLY because they suck.
You see, a business project needs to be shown to be profitable (in the short or long term), and if the original business plan didn't drive that point home, well, it'd be rejected by management. Plus the original business plan would have had to fit into Sony's core business model. If not (and this plan did not!), the plan would have to be much more detailed and robust.
It isn't that management is always stupid - most executives get dozens of business plans thrown in front of them every week. They have to pick and choose the most likely to succeed.
After all, it doesn't make anyone look good if $10 million was "lost" in a business plan that most senior executives would laugh at.
It's kind of like FedEx. We all know that business plan only got a "C" at Harvard Business School. But the fact is, it should have gotten an "F". As a business plan, it sucked. Sure, in the end it turned out to be a wildly successful and profitable business... but the initial business plan could be summed up as "likely to be a failure".
It seems like the cable industry has a great incentive to commonize the set-top cable box. With equipment manufacturers coming and going over the years, with diverging equipment standards, why didn't the cable industry collective deliver a conclusion a decade ago?
Clearly they were able to do so with cable modems (DOCSIS). I know the whole cable modem buiness was on 3 or 5 years old, so maybe that was the difference.
I think a study of their failure to get their act together would help other industries (like the wireless telephone industry) figure out what the heck they're doing wrong. Clearly, commonality of standards greatly lowers infrastructure costs. And CATV and Wireless Telco wants to minimize device cost, 'cause they sell service.
Does some business school have a (good) case study that discusses this issue? If these business schools are worth beans, someone has studied this before and published it in a journal. Someone post a URL!