Well in the case of something non-trivial, like the military, the reason why it's a Bad Thing is because then you end up with some rich incompetent running something that they have no business running.
Because Dell's Ubuntu machines are slightly cheaper than their Window's equivalents, last I heard. I don't think they would do that if they still had to pay per machine.
Though I am sure a lot of OEMs get the per machine treatment.
They're aren't licensing Linux or OS X to you, they just want money for every computer, which is two different things.... (yes, I agree it's pretty greedy and underhanded)...
Not only that, think of the blowback from the community if Shuttleworth sealed such a deal.
Ubuntu is still at a stage where a lot of the progress depends on hardwork of the True Believers of the community. Such a deal would kill their enthusiasm for Ubuntu because they say, "Look, Shuttleworth is just like the rest of the sell-outs." And then a fork would soon happen where lots of the movers/shakers migrate to.
in terms of productivity. Yes, a cell phone as a cell phone can be nice, but the millions of hard-to-use features on them don't cut it. Same with me goes for PDAs and other such electronic organizers.
This is not to say other people won't find them useful nor that there are a lack of gadgets that are truly useful (GPS navigation is indeed nice) but rather the lack of integration, seamless transparency and/or AI in these gadgets that currently only let the already organized and motivated stay organized. It's not as bad as some truly useless products of the 80s/early 90s I remember my dad having, using for a week, and then letting it sit around for me to discover.
I think google with gmail or Apple with the iPhone are headed finally in the right direction, after all these years. But I have greater hope that a color, high-res E-reader will reduce my bookshelf down to one tablet (next big gadget) than having a truly useful, automated PDA which really fits the bill of being a Personal Digital ASSISTANT rather than me being a slave to it.
Is it really an invention when it's just the logical combination of things? I don't think so, not in the league of what patents were to protect. Patents were not meant to protect ideas in the first place, but implementations.
If these ideas would come about anyway through a natural progression, why do we have patents again? What was the purpose of patents again? American Constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
It seems to me that software got along just fine without patents and that patents in this field are hindering the stated purpose.
We let manufacturing jobs slip into other countries, and are told to be reassured - we get to keep the good engineering jobs. Yet they also set up the system that does not promote innovation, but rather one that is stacked in favor of the big players but with "good" intentions came the unintended consequences - like how leechers game the system.
How can people stay positive on an economy that seems neither ultimately market-based rather than litigation based and where what used to be virtues (hard work, creativity, taking a chance) are punished by the government and unworthy trolls/big_players get the gains instead?
It doesn't. From my personal reading of the situation, this will only encourage "official" spam that is whitelisted by companies that can afford to pay it. An oldie but a goodie:
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (X) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you and/or your company:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. (X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
"Used generally to describe a series of economic events from the 2nd half of the 15th century to the first half of the 17th, the price revolution refers most specifically to the high rate of inflation that characterized the period across Western Europe, with prices on average rising perhaps sixfold over 150 years.
As early as the 16th century, it was thought that this high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the New World, especially the silver of Peru which began to be mined in large quantities from 1545. According to this theory, there was simply too much money for the amount of available goods.
In reality, the start of the rise in prices predated the large-scale influx of bullion from across the Atlantic..."
and goes on to list other factors. I also not sure if the 6x increase in price over 150 years is such a bad thing, consider this inflation calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
tells me $100 in 1917 is $1,614.73 dollars today.
I'm just not sure that printing up money is the best solution either. My family (in Germany) lived through a total devaluation of money in the 1920's (where it came to a point that a wheelbarrow full got you a loaf of bread) and again after the war but before the 1948 introduction of the Bundes Mark. Hard times. I don't know if the American part of my family had to live through such a thing, as the worst inflation I heard of on that side was during the Carter administration, despite the depression in the 20's/30's.
I was for McCain in 2000, no longer. The straight talk express has been derailed. I still respect him greatly as a war veteran, and that he was 1 of 2 republics to denounce torture along with Ron Paul, in the debates - but otherwise he has become a political hack like the rest.
Mike Gravel or Ron Paul. They might be older, but Washington needs adult supervision.
that the original Matrix was done in by lackluster sequels. There was blowback, and the sequels were so poor lowered the value of the original because they were all supposed to be tied in together into some humongous puzzle. The fans felt a lot of betrayal for the extended wait for what turned out to be crap.
The original Pirates was much better than the two sequel, each of declining quality. But the sequels were "good enough" not to get fan blowback on the original.
Also, each Matrix felt slightly incomplete while the original Pirates could stand by itself even with the loose ends not tied up.
Lately, I've been avoiding any movies with 3 explicitly or implicity in the title. Sadly, that has been a boatload of movies lately.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1
Heh, same here on the Microsoft Comfort curve:)
Actually, I would have bought a MS split keyboard design at the time, but they really mangled the arrow keys and the inst/hm/pgup/pgdown/dl/end/pgdown keys in a really stupid and nonstandard configuration.
Maybe I'm being a luddite, but I want my kids to have access to a physical newspaper at the breakfast table w/o having them having to go online. So, even though I can get the NYT for free online, I'll pay for it to have the tree-killing version too. The non-luddite in me also reaps the benefits of access to NYT historical content which is available to me since I take the tree-killing version..
I think you are.
In twenty years, e-paper will have taken over, today models are not bad - Sony's and IRex's. Just not cheap enough - about $600-700. Think about how much better and cheaper it will be in 20 years.
Your kids will be reading a physical epaper at breakfast. It will be updated wirelessly. Not only that, they can locally access all their previous epapers, up to when their subscription started. On the same thing, they have all their school books, casual books for fun, comics, zines, etcetera. Little Johnny also found a way to stash some playboys on there. For the articles.
News services adopt it because the cost of delivery drops to nil. Schools adopt it because they can have some books free (good books about some subjects are public domain or under a free license). Before they would have to have selected a book being currently published. Most likely expensive. And it saves a lot of trees.
And you get access to the NYT historical content.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1
I don't own an MP3 player because, well, I really don't care to, but I have tried iPods and a Zune from friends.
Frankly, at the price level the iPod is simply a better player just from the buttons. The Zune's buttons seem clunky and that impression extends to the whole product. The iPod's clickwheel is minimal, elegant and probably the first reason I would not look at a Zune. It's not like the Zune is cheaper or anything.
As it is, I think the market is headed toward flash memory, and the nano is more attractive. I also think an integrated phone would be more attrative (iPhone). In any case, I see the HD based MP3 player market shrinking.
As to why hate the Zune blindly -- because there are people who hate Microsoft for very legitimate reasons. They have a right to boycott the product and spread the word.
There was a big article in the New York Times earlier this year about it (paper) but I'm lazy and don't want to register. If you want to look further into it, wikipedia is a good start:
I disagree with the ancestors comment. Here's why.
Alcohol came with the rise of civilizations. That is at most 10-12K old, as far as I am aware. What did they drink in the millions of years before that? Evolution acclimated us toward water.
Also, before the white man came, Indians never had alcohol. Once they came in contact with it, they had such an weakness for it, that many became addicted and became sick over it.
Before civilization started, 12K years ago, I really doubt people had a constant or ready access to anything but water. That millions of years of evolution that acclimated us to drinking water. And what of our evolution as animals, what did they drink?
If you have another theory, tell me.
As for being a monk, no. I'm someone that poisoned himself in a way with that junk.
It is a well known fact in science that depriving yourself of calories (1200-1400 a day for a sedentary lifestyle instead of 2000) is one of the surest ways of extending your life and living healthy. That means kicking out caloric drinks.
Soda rots your teeth and probably contributes to diabetes II.
Diet Soda, it has been found in a European study (German?) to fuck with your blood sugar level - the body thinks it's getting sugar, pumps you with insulin, and it turns out you aren't getting any.
And all the sugar-substitue additives have been questions for years.
Drink Water or at worst carbonated water. Maybe a little tea or iced tea made from decent leaves (not the garbage leaves in lipton surrounded by bleached paper to dunk in water), or even a little expresso.
Leave out the soda pop, leave out most of the milk (thought to contribute to kidney stones), leave out the juice, etcetera. And for god's sake leave out anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup - poison. Our ancestors were able to make due with water as a drink and so our bodies should be acclimated to it.
The funny thing is, we have access to the cleanest water in history, without it being muddy or full of minerals, and we found a "need" to have all this oversweetened garbage instead.
It's not hard, start drinking for a week - you'll be over the sweet addiction. I like ice water the best. If you have to, treat yourself to a juice drink or milk once a day.
they see that MS is insanely jealous lately of anybody that is also making money.
Playstation->Xbox iPod->Zune Google->???? ("I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.)
I'm surprised they haven't gotten jealous of intel yet and started making their own chips:) Anyway, MS is already in the hardare business with Xbox/360 - a long shot to anything competitive to dell I know, but still, don't stick all your eggs in one basket - don't trust your business to a 3rd party.
It's in Dell's and any computer manufacturer's longterm interest to have a 2nd viable consumer OS when it comes times for negotiations and the like. (Otherwise MS can threaten to hold any of them hostage to their terms, cutting off cheap licenses, without a fear of losing marketshare because Maker X can't realistically offer any other OS).
Perhaps, but I see a lot of value in apple having multiple architecture - it doesn't tie them down to any one supplier which was their essential problem with IBM. They won't run into the same problems with Intel (mainstream CPUs is their business) but I could see Apple using alternative architectures to get their foot in the door in niche (but lucrative) markets like servers and graphics where another chip is preferred because of speed or ease of low level programming (without the x86 hacks).
If this is the scenario, they won't even have to offer this to the mainstream market, perhaps to avoid Joe Sixpack support on why every different mac app on the internet won't run, and perhaps to stay sweethearts with Intel.
Apple has transistion sucessfully from the Motorola chips to PowerPC to Intel - they have the expertise to keep a constant "transistion" and Linux proves the viability of multiple architectures.
Who knows, this may not even be bad for Intel - perhaps Apple could have (and in the future) could give Intel an orgasm by making the server products Itanium based.
I honestly really could not think of a reason anyone would enjoy using Yahoo over Gmail - I have tried their "upgrade"/"nextgen" interface and it is even more horrid. To each their own, I guess.
If you need that many temp. email address - may I suggest mailinator? It might be easier on you plus it won't reduced the options for people trying to find a handle not already taken.
I have multiple accounts on Yahoo I don't use anymore because Gmail is so much better, but which I keep around incase there are accounts I signed up for that I forgot to transfer over.
And how strong is Yahoo's protection against fake accounts these days?
Slashdot Mirror
Because Dell's Ubuntu machines are slightly cheaper than their Window's equivalents, last I heard. I don't think they would do that if they still had to pay per machine.
Though I am sure a lot of OEMs get the per machine treatment.
They're aren't licensing Linux or OS X to you, they just want money for every computer, which is two different things.... (yes, I agree it's pretty greedy and underhanded)...
Not only that, think of the blowback from the community if Shuttleworth sealed such a deal.
Ubuntu is still at a stage where a lot of the progress depends on hardwork of the True Believers of the community. Such a deal would kill their enthusiasm for Ubuntu because they say, "Look, Shuttleworth is just like the rest of the sell-outs." And then a fork would soon happen where lots of the movers/shakers migrate to.
in terms of productivity. Yes, a cell phone as a cell phone can be nice, but the millions of hard-to-use features on them don't cut it. Same with me goes for PDAs and other such electronic organizers.
This is not to say other people won't find them useful nor that there are a lack of gadgets that are truly useful (GPS navigation is indeed nice) but rather the lack of integration, seamless transparency and/or AI in these gadgets that currently only let the already organized and motivated stay organized. It's not as bad as some truly useless products of the 80s/early 90s I remember my dad having, using for a week, and then letting it sit around for me to discover.
I think google with gmail or Apple with the iPhone are headed finally in the right direction, after all these years. But I have greater hope that a color, high-res E-reader will reduce my bookshelf down to one tablet (next big gadget) than having a truly useful, automated PDA which really fits the bill of being a Personal Digital ASSISTANT rather than me being a slave to it.
Is it really an invention when it's just the logical combination of things? I don't think so, not in the league of what patents were to protect. Patents were not meant to protect ideas in the first place, but implementations.
If these ideas would come about anyway through a natural progression, why do we have patents again? What was the purpose of patents again? American Constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
It seems to me that software got along just fine without patents and that patents in this field are hindering the stated purpose.
We let manufacturing jobs slip into other countries, and are told to be reassured - we get to keep the good engineering jobs. Yet they also set up the system that does not promote innovation, but rather one that is stacked in favor of the big players but with "good" intentions came the unintended consequences - like how leechers game the system.
How can people stay positive on an economy that seems neither ultimately market-based rather than litigation based and where what used to be virtues (hard work, creativity, taking a chance) are punished by the government and unworthy trolls/big_players get the gains instead?
Yup, I forgot to tribute this iteration of it, thanks for pointing it out:)
It doesn't. From my personal reading of the situation, this will only encourage "official" spam that is whitelisted by companies that can afford to pay it. An oldie but a goodie:
Your activities advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(X) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you and/or your company:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
But the wiki article you link to says:
"Used generally to describe a series of economic events from the 2nd half of the 15th century to the first half of the 17th, the price revolution refers most specifically to the high rate of inflation that characterized the period across Western Europe, with prices on average rising perhaps sixfold over 150 years.
As early as the 16th century, it was thought that this high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the New World, especially the silver of Peru which began to be mined in large quantities from 1545. According to this theory, there was simply too much money for the amount of available goods.
In reality, the start of the rise in prices predated the large-scale influx of bullion from across the Atlantic..."
and goes on to list other factors. I also not sure if the 6x increase in price over 150 years is such a bad thing, consider this inflation calculator:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
tells me $100 in 1917 is $1,614.73 dollars today.
I'm just not sure that printing up money is the best solution either. My family (in Germany) lived through a total devaluation of money in the 1920's (where it came to a point that a wheelbarrow full got you a loaf of bread) and again after the war but before the 1948 introduction of the Bundes Mark. Hard times. I don't know if the American part of my family had to live through such a thing, as the worst inflation I heard of on that side was during the Carter administration, despite the depression in the 20's/30's.
You're not really explaining why that would be a bad thing...
I was for McCain in 2000, no longer. The straight talk express has been derailed. I still respect him greatly as a war veteran, and that he was 1 of 2 republics to denounce torture along with Ron Paul, in the debates - but otherwise he has become a political hack like the rest.
Mike Gravel or Ron Paul. They might be older, but Washington needs adult supervision.
that the original Matrix was done in by lackluster sequels. There was blowback, and the sequels were so poor lowered the value of the original because they were all supposed to be tied in together into some humongous puzzle. The fans felt a lot of betrayal for the extended wait for what turned out to be crap.
The original Pirates was much better than the two sequel, each of declining quality. But the sequels were "good enough" not to get fan blowback on the original.
Also, each Matrix felt slightly incomplete while the original Pirates could stand by itself even with the loose ends not tied up.
Lately, I've been avoiding any movies with 3 explicitly or implicity in the title. Sadly, that has been a boatload of movies lately.
Heh, same here on the Microsoft Comfort curve:)
Actually, I would have bought a MS split keyboard design at the time, but they really mangled the arrow keys and the inst/hm/pgup/pgdown/dl/end/pgdown keys in a really stupid and nonstandard configuration.
I think I'm offtopic....
I think you are.
In twenty years, e-paper will have taken over, today models are not bad - Sony's and IRex's. Just not cheap enough - about $600-700. Think about how much better and cheaper it will be in 20 years.
Your kids will be reading a physical epaper at breakfast. It will be updated wirelessly. Not only that, they can locally access all their previous epapers, up to when their subscription started. On the same thing, they have all their school books, casual books for fun, comics, zines, etcetera. Little Johnny also found a way to stash some playboys on there. For the articles.
News services adopt it because the cost of delivery drops to nil. Schools adopt it because they can have some books free (good books about some subjects are public domain or under a free license). Before they would have to have selected a book being currently published. Most likely expensive. And it saves a lot of trees.
And you get access to the NYT historical content.
I don't own an MP3 player because, well, I really don't care to, but I have tried iPods and a Zune from friends.
Frankly, at the price level the iPod is simply a better player just from the buttons. The Zune's buttons seem clunky and that impression extends to the whole product. The iPod's clickwheel is minimal, elegant and probably the first reason I would not look at a Zune. It's not like the Zune is cheaper or anything.
As it is, I think the market is headed toward flash memory, and the nano is more attractive. I also think an integrated phone would be more attrative (iPhone). In any case, I see the HD based MP3 player market shrinking.
As to why hate the Zune blindly -- because there are people who hate Microsoft for very legitimate reasons. They have a right to boycott the product and spread the word.
There was a big article in the New York Times earlier this year about it (paper) but I'm lazy and don't want to register. If you want to look further into it, wikipedia is a good start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction
I disagree with the ancestors comment. Here's why.
Alcohol came with the rise of civilizations. That is at most 10-12K old, as far as I am aware. What did they drink in the millions of years before that? Evolution acclimated us toward water.
Also, before the white man came, Indians never had alcohol. Once they came in contact with it, they had such an weakness for it, that many became addicted and became sick over it.
We tolerate alcohol, but only to a point.
Before civilization started, 12K years ago, I really doubt people had a constant or ready access to anything but water. That millions of years of evolution that acclimated us to drinking water. And what of our evolution as animals, what did they drink?
If you have another theory, tell me.
As for being a monk, no. I'm someone that poisoned himself in a way with that junk.
It is a well known fact in science that depriving yourself of calories (1200-1400 a day for a sedentary lifestyle instead of 2000) is one of the surest ways of extending your life and living healthy. That means kicking out caloric drinks.
Look it up.
Soda rots your teeth and probably contributes to diabetes II.
Diet Soda, it has been found in a European study (German?) to fuck with your blood sugar level - the body thinks it's getting sugar, pumps you with insulin, and it turns out you aren't getting any.
And all the sugar-substitue additives have been questions for years.
Drink Water or at worst carbonated water. Maybe a little tea or iced tea made from decent leaves (not the garbage leaves in lipton surrounded by bleached paper to dunk in water), or even a little expresso.
Leave out the soda pop, leave out most of the milk (thought to contribute to kidney stones), leave out the juice, etcetera. And for god's sake leave out anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup - poison. Our ancestors were able to make due with water as a drink and so our bodies should be acclimated to it.
The funny thing is, we have access to the cleanest water in history, without it being muddy or full of minerals, and we found a "need" to have all this oversweetened garbage instead.
It's not hard, start drinking for a week - you'll be over the sweet addiction. I like ice water the best. If you have to, treat yourself to a juice drink or milk once a day.
Pay the microsoft tax or else!
they see that MS is insanely jealous lately of anybody that is also making money.
Playstation->Xbox
iPod->Zune
Google->???? ("I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.)
I'm surprised they haven't gotten jealous of intel yet and started making their own chips:) Anyway, MS is already in the hardare business with Xbox/360 - a long shot to anything competitive to dell I know, but still, don't stick all your eggs in one basket - don't trust your business to a 3rd party.
It's in Dell's and any computer manufacturer's longterm interest to have a 2nd viable consumer OS when it comes times for negotiations and the like. (Otherwise MS can threaten to hold any of them hostage to their terms, cutting off cheap licenses, without a fear of losing marketshare because Maker X can't realistically offer any other OS).
Perhaps, but I see a lot of value in apple having multiple architecture - it doesn't tie them down to any one supplier which was their essential problem with IBM. They won't run into the same problems with Intel (mainstream CPUs is their business) but I could see Apple using alternative architectures to get their foot in the door in niche (but lucrative) markets like servers and graphics where another chip is preferred because of speed or ease of low level programming (without the x86 hacks).
If this is the scenario, they won't even have to offer this to the mainstream market, perhaps to avoid Joe Sixpack support on why every different mac app on the internet won't run, and perhaps to stay sweethearts with Intel.
Apple has transistion sucessfully from the Motorola chips to PowerPC to Intel - they have the expertise to keep a constant "transistion" and Linux proves the viability of multiple architectures.
Who knows, this may not even be bad for Intel - perhaps Apple could have (and in the future) could give Intel an orgasm by making the server products Itanium based.
I honestly really could not think of a reason anyone would enjoy using Yahoo over Gmail - I have tried their "upgrade"/"nextgen" interface and it is even more horrid. To each their own, I guess.
If you need that many temp. email address - may I suggest mailinator? It might be easier on you plus it won't reduced the options for people trying to find a handle not already taken.
I have multiple accounts on Yahoo I don't use anymore because Gmail is so much better, but which I keep around incase there are accounts I signed up for that I forgot to transfer over.
And how strong is Yahoo's protection against fake accounts these days?