.. Which curves? The broadband adoption curve vs. the cost per gigabyte of commodity drives curve.
Google surfs in there, adding new hardware with cheaper storage whilst decommissioning older hardware (in theory, since it's more power-efficient to do more with newer hardware, and power is only gonna be gettin more expensive, better to ditch boxes when they are, say, 50% less cpu/storage capable than a box with the equivalent amp requirement) so considering how cheap storage has gotten and how quickly it has gotten there, this may just be a bit of underpromising going on.
I just hope they recycle the boxes appropriately as they're rotated out of the lineup. I can't imagine that they have anything other than token systems (like the Lego server) running that are more than 4 years old...
(Also I have to wonder, with the power requirements, if they're interested in having their own custom low-power x86-compatible chipsets and motherboards built, maybe SBCs...)
_This_ would get me to get XBox360, even though I don't have an HD set. I would literally leave work early and go to Costco the moment this hits the shops.
IFF it's a MMORPG of course (or at least a coop multiplayer that can handle up to 8 in a party), so I can run with my chummers round the nation.
Labor is the only thing of value in the market, period.
Bullshit. History is on my side, and so are the robots. I win.
I nowhere mentioned or believe that doctors should be paid the same as manual labor; however, a proper society pays every contributor at least something that allows a modestly comfortable life.
Then emigrate to such a proper society. Oh wait, there are none left anymore? Because such presumptions have been debunked by human behavior? Because giving governments authority to mandate outcomes is a sure path to failure, poverty and totalitarianism, as proven by the historical record? Because demanding the equality of outcomes mean that people will become equally impoverished? Taking from one (at gunpoint, viz the previously mentioned reductio ad absurdum) to give to another is theft. It was theft when Robin Hood did it, it was theft when Stalin did it, and it's theft when Congress does it.
The point is you can believe anything you like: labor theory of value, social justice, the tooth fairy, that's your right. However, when it comes to the real world you have an obligation to learn history and try to understand why things are the way they are, why they've become the way they've become, what has been tried, what has failed. It just annoys me to no end to hear these college knowitalls who haven't finished their history requirements (or worse, those that have but had to take their history from some former comintern academics) blather on without an iota of self-examination about the past, and the motivations, and the people on all sides who lived through that horrible communist time.
The point is that the entire concept of making money through the manipulation of money without thought to the end result defeats what I believe strongly to be the idea behind capitalism: reward through ingenuity, invention, and hard work in a way that benefits society.
That's what the manipulation of money (investment) is, that's its DEFINITION. So some folks don't invest money in the places you would prefer, boo hoo. Some other folks invest money in illegal/immoral ways (monsanto, feedlots, illegal immigrant/h1b hiring to depress wages), petition your representatives and/or change your habits. After 9/11 I rethought aspects of my behavior and chose to not continue driving my Jeep after its lease was up, and instead chose a more efficient and better-for-the-global-environment diesel instead. Would I force everyone to drive diesels and hybrids at gunpoint (the reductio ad absurdum of government mandation)? No. I'd explain things in a complete way and expect people to behave rationally, and I'd make sure that government-based fooling with free market pricing information was at least transparent and fully-documented.
The only thing of real worth is labor.
Wrong. Labor is worth what someone will pay for it. The Labor Theory of Value is entirely and completely wrong and fully debunked by now. For example, if person A will build widgets for $50/hr and person B will build them for $5/hr, guess who gets the job, and guess how much the labor for building widgets is worth? And guess how much labor's worth when robots can build those widgets for $0.05/hr? It might not be comforting or nice, but it's the truth.
Oh, and the LTV corollary that a doctor's labor is worth the same as a ditchdigger is such laughable bullshit that it seems bizarre that folks actually bought into this cultlike concept. Just imagine a country of doctors painting their houses and plumbers sweeping the gutters. Oh wait, the Soviets tried that. SUCKERS...
MBA's should not be paid as handsomely as they are for essentially supervising a company. The goal of a company's CEO should not be making money by whatever means possible, but rather making sure that the company's work and products are the best they can be, as logically, that will make you profitable and that's the only reason you should be profitable.
Wrong. MBAs and CEOs should be paid what the market dictates they be paid. CEOs should make money by any means necessary, since shareholders can fire them for doing less. Now, consumers may choose to buy a product based on intangibles, such as a company's "corporate responsibility" or "environmental sustainability", but make no mistake: any company that behaves in a "responsible" manner only does so for the PR, and as soon as they don't derive an improved rate of return for that PR that leadership will be replaced by a leadership that will. That's the most efficent way of deploying capital, as proven by history.
Now people can either choose to (or to not) patronize companies based on their behavior, or they can use laws or taxes passed by their representatives to set the rules of a particular market, but any government tinkering in and of itself distorts markets in often unpredictable ways, and if you seek to do such things you are morally obliged to be open about it and not try to hide or sugarcoat your agenda.
"To [secure] to each laborer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government."
Sorry Abe, mechanization and the Asian population boom have obsoleted your sentiments. The "whole product" of labor is now what, $7/day in China?
The worthy object of good government now is to help laborers develop skills and productivity that increases the value of their labor, so that they're not put out of the market by mechanization or foreign competition.
Yeah, but missiles mean jobs to those who design, build, maintain and man them. Jobs in states that have low student counts but just as many senators as those who have high student counts. For senators in those states, those missiles are more important than money wasted on some California or New York teachers-union-inflated salaries.
This is why education _must_ remain the prerogative of state-level politics, and why I, as a resident of a high-population state, believe that the senate must be abolished. What's Wyoming gonna do, secede?
Given their reliance on only ATT as their network provider, this is precisely the problem they have _now_, and what they need to spend bucketloads of cash fixing.
They need multiple sites around the world, with multiple OC192s to multiple providers, all BGP'd to the gills. They need to buy dark fiber and light that shit up.
Then again, why bother, it's not like it's a free market out there and there won't be any competitors to WoW that can get their act together, right? I mean Blizzard owns the patents on MMORPGaming, right?
Blizzard, I can guarantee this: if you spend $35 million per month on refactoring, hardware and bandwidth, all your problems go away. Guaranteed. I promise.
Knights has a huge story with a bunch of twists in it. There is a lot of character development (and character interaction/relationship stuff) and a lot of "makes you think" dialogue. Also a great game in every way... wait... the graphics sucked.
The KOTORs, Jade Empire, and Halo felt like movies while I was playing them... I can imagine seeing good renditions of these titles on screen, iff Uwe Boll, Paul W.S. Anderson and Michael Bay are sent off to carousel to renew...
McNealy is making dinosaurs in the age of small more intelligent (and wealthier mammals, ie x86).
Actually, between the opensourcing of Solaris, the incorporation of AMD64 as a first-tier platform, and the Niagara chipset, along with the stuff in Solaris 10 that Sun should have had years ago, I'm more interested in Sun now than I've been in at least 5 years. I have a feeling McNealy was dragged kicking and screaming into the recent changes (I mean the man let Sun coast on UltraSPARC II for how long? Long enough for IBM to come from behind from the relatively anemic POWER1 to the POWER4 and clean Sun's price/perfomance clock), and if Sun's getting traction it's due to Mr. Schwartz's initiatives and this is the legitimate result.
If Sun doesn't haemorrage money and people during this transition, I've got more confidence in them now than I did when you could buy all the SPARC you needed off dotcom eBay auctions.
Not gonna happen for awhile (or ever) methinks, since I doubt that even now they make a dime in profit on it. IIRC Sony makes a profit on both PSX and PS2.
Besides, the components in XBox are no longer really parts-bin, I mean where's the economy of scale for that CPU, disk and memory? And aren't the GPUs even _more_ expensive (or unavailable)?
DirectX is more than 3D graphics, and lots of game developers are using it. That is one of the big reasons Apple has so few games to choose from comparatively.
And given that Apple has access to Microsoft IP (though I don't think it's definitely guaranteed that they had access to _everything_) thru 2001 they've got a pretty good headstart.
The point is, Microsoft has really been pretty stagnant since 2001 (with the exception of DirectX going from 7 or 8 to 9) and given that Vista could well be the big break in compatibility release, I think having build support for DirectX in XCode (along with some serious improvements in 3D drivers and possibly a new kernel) would be a huge win for Apple users.
Naah, the idea is that a Win32 programmer would only have to recompile their VC/VC++ project after importing it into XCode, and out would come a universal binary, and/or optionally a Win32 executable + associated objects. A Windows person wouldn't have to know a lick of Carbon or Cocoa to get the majority of their code to work, perhaps a bit of Interface Builder (which would preferably be expanded to include interfaces to standard Windows widgets like file selectors).
Ideally this would be in a sandbox, similar to a virtual machine.
Unnecessary.. Apple could implement the Win32 code (or better yet simply use the API as a Carbon-style interface to OS X) and avoid MS bugs by avoiding MS code.
MS exploits come from (in the overwhelming main) either VB/VBA scripting shenanigans or poorly-coded OS components. With Apple smart enough not to reimplement VB/VBA retardation in its software, and with the components actually being OS X with just an API interface layer ala WINE, as long as Apple decides not to be virus-feature-complete they should not be susceptible to Windows-specific virus code.
And who knows, Windows-only developers might start considering a Mac port more seriously if a significant portion of their user base started running their apps on a Mac.
More importantly, if they could carry over their non-UI logic with just a recompile via some sort of Carbon-style XCode project mechanism (that would import, say, VC and VC++ projects) and then redo the UI via the Interface Builder (but be able to access NIB data via Win32 widget calls) then the barrier to porting to OS X would pretty much go away.
Hell, make XCode a cross-compiler that builds Win32 apps from Win32 and Cocoa projects and give it away for free (but don't port it to Windows)...
I wonder that his assumption Microsoft can't break its own API in Windows is correct, and suspect (or fear) it isn't. Or, at best, writing to Microsoft's API is only a half truth and is at the core of one of the EU's complaints against Microsoft -- complete API documentation!
TFA addresses this by stating that Apple may have had access to the official MS API documentation as part of its settlement.
Cringely does confirm third party reports of this suite of software working at Apple, but I wonder for how long? And for what versions? A complete, robust, and current maintenance of what is available for a Windows API is a minefield, and in my opinion, likely to somehow "break" rather quickly.
The whole point of the article is that it would be limited to XP or before, using XP's Win32 as the cutoff to compatibility. The assumption being that anything after XP is not worth going out of your way to support.
This is similar to the assumption that Office 97 is good enough for anyone, and it may actually be a pretty good assumption!
Now going beyond Wine could include, say, virtualizing the registry and installation process of a windows app so that it resides in a standard OS X file/directory like a proper OS X app. Or, there could be a Carbon-style Win32 framework in XCode 3, where you can recompile your existing code (with some localization work to handle stuff like the installer, window layout, etc). I've been whining for a DirectX9 porting framework in OS X for a long time now, perhaps they'll do the entire Win32 API?
The question then becomes "why write Cocoa apps at all?" The answer being "It's easier and faster to write featureful and powerful apps in Cocoa, taking advantage of Core*, iApp integration and other frameworks".
But why not just have nice but small 'pied a terre' offices in the fancy schmancy places and incorporate in no-tax-land?
I just wonder where the inflection point is, when the costs of doing business in NY or CA outweigh the benefits of doing business there. I know Nissan is relocating their HQ to Tennessee, and though they are estimated to lose around 60% of their workforce, there's apparently thousands of applications...
Keep in mind also that this line of thinking really only applies to companies too small for the more interesting tax and outsourcing shenanigans....
.. I mean why, in this day and age, would someone choose to enlarge business in CA? With costs of everything sky-high, traffic, smog, and the punishing taxes, I just don't see it.
I mean, except for the nice weather, surfing and scantily-clad girls...
Granted, relocating _everything_ may not wash in the overall cost/benefit analysis, but I don't see why anyone would choose to start a business any larger than a dorm room or off-campus house in CA.
Frankly, if I were creating a 'real' business (which involved more people than could comfortably fit in my dining room), why shouldn't I do it in Nevada, which has _no_ corporate income tax (or individual income tax for that matter)?
Slashdot Mirror
.. Which curves? The broadband adoption curve vs. the cost per gigabyte of commodity drives curve.
Google surfs in there, adding new hardware with cheaper storage whilst decommissioning older hardware (in theory, since it's more power-efficient to do more with newer hardware, and power is only gonna be gettin more expensive, better to ditch boxes when they are, say, 50% less cpu/storage capable than a box with the equivalent amp requirement) so considering how cheap storage has gotten and how quickly it has gotten there, this may just be a bit of underpromising going on.
I just hope they recycle the boxes appropriately as they're rotated out of the lineup. I can't imagine that they have anything other than token systems (like the Lego server) running that are more than 4 years old...
(Also I have to wonder, with the power requirements, if they're interested in having their own custom low-power x86-compatible chipsets and motherboards built, maybe SBCs...)
I wonder how much money WoW and other MMORPGs have siphoned out of the gaming market...
_This_ would get me to get XBox360, even though I don't have an HD set. I would literally leave work early and go to Costco the moment this hits the shops.
IFF it's a MMORPG of course (or at least a coop multiplayer that can handle up to 8 in a party), so I can run with my chummers round the nation.
Hell, I'd quit WoW for this if they did it right.
OHS NAP
Labor is the only thing of value in the market, period.
Bullshit. History is on my side, and so are the robots. I win.
I nowhere mentioned or believe that doctors should be paid the same as manual labor; however, a proper society pays every contributor at least something that allows a modestly comfortable life.
Then emigrate to such a proper society. Oh wait, there are none left anymore? Because such presumptions have been debunked by human behavior? Because giving governments authority to mandate outcomes is a sure path to failure, poverty and totalitarianism, as proven by the historical record? Because demanding the equality of outcomes mean that people will become equally impoverished? Taking from one (at gunpoint, viz the previously mentioned reductio ad absurdum) to give to another is theft. It was theft when Robin Hood did it, it was theft when Stalin did it, and it's theft when Congress does it.
The point is you can believe anything you like: labor theory of value, social justice, the tooth fairy, that's your right. However, when it comes to the real world you have an obligation to learn history and try to understand why things are the way they are, why they've become the way they've become, what has been tried, what has failed. It just annoys me to no end to hear these college knowitalls who haven't finished their history requirements (or worse, those that have but had to take their history from some former comintern academics) blather on without an iota of self-examination about the past, and the motivations, and the people on all sides who lived through that horrible communist time.
The point is that the entire concept of making money through the manipulation of money without thought to the end result defeats what I believe strongly to be the idea behind capitalism: reward through ingenuity, invention, and hard work in a way that benefits society.
That's what the manipulation of money (investment) is, that's its DEFINITION. So some folks don't invest money in the places you would prefer, boo hoo. Some other folks invest money in illegal/immoral ways (monsanto, feedlots, illegal immigrant/h1b hiring to depress wages), petition your representatives and/or change your habits. After 9/11 I rethought aspects of my behavior and chose to not continue driving my Jeep after its lease was up, and instead chose a more efficient and better-for-the-global-environment diesel instead. Would I force everyone to drive diesels and hybrids at gunpoint (the reductio ad absurdum of government mandation)? No. I'd explain things in a complete way and expect people to behave rationally, and I'd make sure that government-based fooling with free market pricing information was at least transparent and fully-documented.
The only thing of real worth is labor.
Wrong. Labor is worth what someone will pay for it. The Labor Theory of Value is entirely and completely wrong and fully debunked by now. For example, if person A will build widgets for $50/hr and person B will build them for $5/hr, guess who gets the job, and guess how much the labor for building widgets is worth? And guess how much labor's worth when robots can build those widgets for $0.05/hr? It might not be comforting or nice, but it's the truth.
Oh, and the LTV corollary that a doctor's labor is worth the same as a ditchdigger is such laughable bullshit that it seems bizarre that folks actually bought into this cultlike concept. Just imagine a country of doctors painting their houses and plumbers sweeping the gutters. Oh wait, the Soviets tried that. SUCKERS...
MBA's should not be paid as handsomely as they are for essentially supervising a company. The goal of a company's CEO should not be making money by whatever means possible, but rather making sure that the company's work and products are the best they can be, as logically, that will make you profitable and that's the only reason you should be profitable.
Wrong. MBAs and CEOs should be paid what the market dictates they be paid. CEOs should make money by any means necessary, since shareholders can fire them for doing less. Now, consumers may choose to buy a product based on intangibles, such as a company's "corporate responsibility" or "environmental sustainability", but make no mistake: any company that behaves in a "responsible" manner only does so for the PR, and as soon as they don't derive an improved rate of return for that PR that leadership will be replaced by a leadership that will. That's the most efficent way of deploying capital, as proven by history.
Now people can either choose to (or to not) patronize companies based on their behavior, or they can use laws or taxes passed by their representatives to set the rules of a particular market, but any government tinkering in and of itself distorts markets in often unpredictable ways, and if you seek to do such things you are morally obliged to be open about it and not try to hide or sugarcoat your agenda.
"To [secure] to each laborer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government."
Sorry Abe, mechanization and the Asian population boom have obsoleted your sentiments. The "whole product" of labor is now what, $7/day in China?
The worthy object of good government now is to help laborers develop skills and productivity that increases the value of their labor, so that they're not put out of the market by mechanization or foreign competition.
Yeah, but missiles mean jobs to those who design, build, maintain and man them. Jobs in states that have low student counts but just as many senators as those who have high student counts. For senators in those states, those missiles are more important than money wasted on some California or New York teachers-union-inflated salaries.
This is why education _must_ remain the prerogative of state-level politics, and why I, as a resident of a high-population state, believe that the senate must be abolished. What's Wyoming gonna do, secede?
Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? I thought "Viiv" was stupid, but this is schoolyard taunting hell stupid...
Given their reliance on only ATT as their network provider, this is precisely the problem they have _now_, and what they need to spend bucketloads of cash fixing.
They need multiple sites around the world, with multiple OC192s to multiple providers, all BGP'd to the gills. They need to buy dark fiber and light that shit up.
Then again, why bother, it's not like it's a free market out there and there won't be any competitors to WoW that can get their act together, right? I mean Blizzard owns the patents on MMORPGaming, right?
Oh wait.
.. What's that come to again?
And _why_ are there any problems whatsoever?
Blizzard, I can guarantee this: if you spend $35 million per month on refactoring, hardware and bandwidth, all your problems go away. Guaranteed. I promise.
Knights has a huge story with a bunch of twists in it. There is a lot of character development (and character interaction/relationship stuff) and a lot of "makes you think" dialogue. Also a great game in every way... wait... the graphics sucked.
The KOTORs, Jade Empire, and Halo felt like movies while I was playing them... I can imagine seeing good renditions of these titles on screen, iff Uwe Boll, Paul W.S. Anderson and Michael Bay are sent off to carousel to renew...
The background on her character - half-human, half-vampire - is great fodder for some interesting character development.
SEEN IT!
McNealy is making dinosaurs in the age of small more intelligent (and wealthier mammals, ie x86).
Actually, between the opensourcing of Solaris, the incorporation of AMD64 as a first-tier platform, and the Niagara chipset, along with the stuff in Solaris 10 that Sun should have had years ago, I'm more interested in Sun now than I've been in at least 5 years. I have a feeling McNealy was dragged kicking and screaming into the recent changes (I mean the man let Sun coast on UltraSPARC II for how long? Long enough for IBM to come from behind from the relatively anemic POWER1 to the POWER4 and clean Sun's price/perfomance clock), and if Sun's getting traction it's due to Mr. Schwartz's initiatives and this is the legitimate result.
If Sun doesn't haemorrage money and people during this transition, I've got more confidence in them now than I did when you could buy all the SPARC you needed off dotcom eBay auctions.
20km a _large_ distance?
Man, Europe really _is_ different....
(my current commute: 185km.. EACH WAY... Thank goodness for diesel...)
AFAIK the XBox 1 is only available now bundled with Forza?
It's still a rip, but not as egregious a rip as if it were just a $30 jack...
Not gonna happen for awhile (or ever) methinks, since I doubt that even now they make a dime in profit on it. IIRC Sony makes a profit on both PSX and PS2.
Besides, the components in XBox are no longer really parts-bin, I mean where's the economy of scale for that CPU, disk and memory? And aren't the GPUs even _more_ expensive (or unavailable)?
.... is not amused...
Why not do both?
DirectX is more than 3D graphics, and lots of game developers are using it. That is one of the big reasons Apple has so few games to choose from comparatively.
And given that Apple has access to Microsoft IP (though I don't think it's definitely guaranteed that they had access to _everything_) thru 2001 they've got a pretty good headstart.
The point is, Microsoft has really been pretty stagnant since 2001 (with the exception of DirectX going from 7 or 8 to 9) and given that Vista could well be the big break in compatibility release, I think having build support for DirectX in XCode (along with some serious improvements in 3D drivers and possibly a new kernel) would be a huge win for Apple users.
Naah, the idea is that a Win32 programmer would only have to recompile their VC/VC++ project after importing it into XCode, and out would come a universal binary, and/or optionally a Win32 executable + associated objects. A Windows person wouldn't have to know a lick of Carbon or Cocoa to get the majority of their code to work, perhaps a bit of Interface Builder (which would preferably be expanded to include interfaces to standard Windows widgets like file selectors).
Ideally this would be in a sandbox, similar to a virtual machine.
Unnecessary.. Apple could implement the Win32 code (or better yet simply use the API as a Carbon-style interface to OS X) and avoid MS bugs by avoiding MS code.
MS exploits come from (in the overwhelming main) either VB/VBA scripting shenanigans or poorly-coded OS components. With Apple smart enough not to reimplement VB/VBA retardation in its software, and with the components actually being OS X with just an API interface layer ala WINE, as long as Apple decides not to be virus-feature-complete they should not be susceptible to Windows-specific virus code.
And who knows, Windows-only developers might start considering a Mac port more seriously if a significant portion of their user base started running their apps on a Mac.
More importantly, if they could carry over their non-UI logic with just a recompile via some sort of Carbon-style XCode project mechanism (that would import, say, VC and VC++ projects) and then redo the UI via the Interface Builder (but be able to access NIB data via Win32 widget calls) then the barrier to porting to OS X would pretty much go away.
Hell, make XCode a cross-compiler that builds Win32 apps from Win32 and Cocoa projects and give it away for free (but don't port it to Windows)...
I wonder that his assumption Microsoft can't break its own API in Windows is correct, and suspect (or fear) it isn't. Or, at best, writing to Microsoft's API is only a half truth and is at the core of one of the EU's complaints against Microsoft -- complete API documentation!
TFA addresses this by stating that Apple may have had access to the official MS API documentation as part of its settlement.
Cringely does confirm third party reports of this suite of software working at Apple, but I wonder for how long? And for what versions? A complete, robust, and current maintenance of what is available for a Windows API is a minefield, and in my opinion, likely to somehow "break" rather quickly.
The whole point of the article is that it would be limited to XP or before, using XP's Win32 as the cutoff to compatibility. The assumption being that anything after XP is not worth going out of your way to support.
This is similar to the assumption that Office 97 is good enough for anyone, and it may actually be a pretty good assumption!
Now going beyond Wine could include, say, virtualizing the registry and installation process of a windows app so that it resides in a standard OS X file/directory like a proper OS X app. Or, there could be a Carbon-style Win32 framework in XCode 3, where you can recompile your existing code (with some localization work to handle stuff like the installer, window layout, etc). I've been whining for a DirectX9 porting framework in OS X for a long time now, perhaps they'll do the entire Win32 API?
The question then becomes "why write Cocoa apps at all?" The answer being "It's easier and faster to write featureful and powerful apps in Cocoa, taking advantage of Core*, iApp integration and other frameworks".
Fair nuff.
But why not just have nice but small 'pied a terre' offices in the fancy schmancy places and incorporate in no-tax-land?
I just wonder where the inflection point is, when the costs of doing business in NY or CA outweigh the benefits of doing business there. I know Nissan is relocating their HQ to Tennessee, and though they are estimated to lose around 60% of their workforce, there's apparently thousands of applications...
Keep in mind also that this line of thinking really only applies to companies too small for the more interesting tax and outsourcing shenanigans....
In other words, this has been going on for awhile ;)
I gotta wonder if there's money to be made running colo hotels in South Dakota or Wyoming...
.. I mean why, in this day and age, would someone choose to enlarge business in CA? With costs of everything sky-high, traffic, smog, and the punishing taxes, I just don't see it.
I mean, except for the nice weather, surfing and scantily-clad girls...
Granted, relocating _everything_ may not wash in the overall cost/benefit analysis, but I don't see why anyone would choose to start a business any larger than a dorm room or off-campus house in CA.
Frankly, if I were creating a 'real' business (which involved more people than could comfortably fit in my dining room), why shouldn't I do it in Nevada, which has _no_ corporate income tax (or individual income tax for that matter)?