I actually cancelled my subscription to the Globe and Mail for sponsoring her articles about 7 years ago. Mean and vindictive, she had no place in journalism. She's a shrew and a thoroughly despicable person. Although it might be only me, I remember getting the impression that she was a bit of a Chinese communist sympathiser, so her writing an article on the technology 'innovations' of China does not surprise me.
Regarding innovation, you are 100% correct -- that is the US' prime advantage. That plus abundant natural resources which can be exported, or at least support self-sufficiency. Even regarding oil, I believe the US only gets 30% of its supply from OPEC.
Fortunately China is beholden to the US still in many regards. Its needs the US markets to sell products too; it relies upon the US currency to supply economic stability and prevent inflation in China while they go through this boom; and they need North America to provide raw materials and resources. We're a long way from the sunsetting of the American empire, but the US will be facing a new world power as a competitor (if its not already).
I'm Canadian and not overly familiar with the Ohio political landscape; I'm basing most of my info learned in the past 48 hours off of the big 3 networks + PBS + Salon.com + CNN.com.
The lower the # of outstanding votes in the provisional & absentee category, the much more likely it retains a 50/50 split.
The opportunity for 'hope against hope' would be if the provisional ballots were close to historical highs or higher, say the 250k+ range. The theory goes that all the stumping done in the last week to 'get out of the vote' (e.g. Paul Newman going door-to-door) in Cleveland -- traditionally democratic -- might have uncovered a disproportiately high number of net-new democratic votes.
So two factors in play: 1) how big is that pool of provisional votes, 2) why are people provisionally voting? I think #1 will be close to the margin of the Bush victory as it stands, so this is an irrelevant discussion point.
Interestingly, Cincinatti is -so- Republican historically that even FDR never won the popular vote in that city. Ohio is an interesting battle ground state since it seems to have a wide diversity of voting blocks. Rural, industrial urban, white collar urban, and a sizeable boomer-suburbian population as well.
Looks like Kerry took the high road and decided to avoid a long drawn out affair. New Mexico and Iowa don't mean anything at this point, with Ohio representing the presidency.
I've seen reports of anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 provisional votes, plus absentee ballots, plus recounts where necessary, still all hanging in the balance. Its a slim chance, but Kerry could still possibly win it if he pressed ahead with a long, drawn out legal battle. I'm assuming that his concession is a statement that he will not lead the Democrats down that road for the good of the country.
Ohio still has the responsibility of counting those ballots, though.
Well, I work at a Canadian bank and we've had to stop outsourcing alot of our contingency server hosting to the US. Given certain provisions and interpretations of the PATRIOT act, we cannot guarantee privacy of personal data to our customers -- as we must do as indicated by Canadian law. So now instead of having a primary datacentre in Toronto and a backup in South Carolina, we're moving everything out west to Alberta. We still run servers and call centres in the US, but all the data warehousing is now 100% Canadian.
So, if you work in IT, I suspect alot of people have been indirectly affected but don't realise it. I doubt you'll have SWAT teams bursting into your house and seizing your home PC due to using Kazaa, but the aggregate affect over the entire economy is tough to measure.
Paraphrashing Ganhdi, "if we rely upon eye-for-an-eye justice, the whole world will end up blind."
Corporations are big, confusing entities. They're byzantine. Sometimes one individual, or team, or department, or DIVSION, exercise a strategy inconsistent or in competition with the corporation's main objective. How many times have you gone to work, looked at a project, and wondered "what the HELL are they doing?!?!?".
In this case, cooler heads prevailed and the situation was rectified. I don't think that Nintendo should be penalised for correcting a mistake. They were even gracious about it.
Fair enough, i'll admit I was using a relatively large brush to paint the Bush administration. I'm just surprised that it took a decade for our currency to drop from $0.80 to $0.60, and then has bounced back in 12-18 months to above $0.80 -- current estimates are targeting a $0.85-0.90 Canadian dolalr.
The massive amounts of US government deficet spending have to be contributing to this in a big way. Outsourcing (thanks India, China) and offshore manufacturing (thanks Walmart) would contribute to this as well though, you're right. These later items are certianly heavily influenced by the American consumer.
Well, our dollar has appreciated against the US $ recently. At the beginning of 2004 it was in the range of $0.63-65, now its $0.82! If you want a good example of how your president has destroyed your economy, take a look at the valuation of your $ vs the rest of the world.
However, in retrospect Canada's $ was undervalued for quite awhile, and this is the MAIN reason why filming came here. Same type of cities and infrastructure as the US, but your money went 1.5x as far. All the BS about subsidies is just that -- if it was true California would have lobbied under NAFTA a long time ago (and lost).
No fair -- I browse Slashdot when at work, with a locked down desktop. When at home I used Firefox out of personal choice, but then I'm usually browsing other sites.
Note: "Other" does not mean PR0N.
Note2: Ok, "does not necessarily mean PR0N".
Note3: Ok, "in the majority of cases does not mean PR0N".
Note4: OK OK OK. "does not exclusively mean PR0N".
I agree with all your points. I actually meant 1860s, I just made a typo. You're right that the south took many years to recover from some brutal campaigns, and black vs white violence continued well into the 20th century.
Given longtime ongoing tension between the northern and southern states, this conflict was probably inevitable.
The interesting thing is that Europe had pretty much ignored the US Civil war and thus missed alot of the lessons of modern industrialised warfare. WWI trench warfare was not difficult to predict if you're familiar with the sieges of Richmond and Atlanta, for example.
This is modded as funny, but I'm sure that Native Americans or the southern states that democratically elected to leave the union would agree with "lincoln was a dictator".
Civil rights and abolition of slavery were later incorporated into the justification for the war, as the body count rose and the South under some brilliant military leadership retained the initiative. "Slavery" is the kindergarden version recounted to try and justify the self-mutilation the US underwent in the 1870s. There's even a joke about this in The Simpsons when Apu applies for US citizenship...The fact remains that if the southern states were justified in leaving the British Empire, they were similarly justified in leaving the Union.
I'm not one for hero worship...Lincoln was a very good leader, but he definitely improved as the war carried on. I'm glad the North won, and the US turned into a much better, recognisable nation after the civil war.
The only movie where a director was given unprecedented control and produced an all-time classic, that i can think of, was Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. Of course, this ignores the fact that his previous 2 attempts -- heart of darkenss, the golden bough(iirc?) -- were left on the cutting room floor. Its success also ruined his hollywood career and he never again reached such heights.
i can't decide if I'd rather have immediate greatness and then suffer 50 years of decline, or enjoy moderate success over a lifetime.:/
Don't forget Leigh Brackett's hands in scripting the dialogue portions of the screenplay. The movie works in my mind because it has a gritty, fatalistic feel similar to many film noir movies -- where Brackett cut her teeth.
Attack of the Clones proved to me that Lucas can't write dialogue to save his life. I think the mistake Lucas has made with the new trilogy is tryin to do too much. He's wealthy beyond imagination, and can make whatever movie he wants -- a bad combination for a director. Directing requires collaboration. Time and again great directors have made horrible, overbloated bombs when given carte blanche, even with proven track records. Look at Lucas' contemporaries....
Spielberg - 1941; Cimino - Heaven's Gate; Coppola - Apocalypse Now is a good film, but it 'broke' him as a director. Aside from maybe Dracula, he's never met the standards of Godfather or AN; Scorcese - Gangs of New York; Polanski - Pirates. I could list another 30 or 40, but you get the point...
Should i call you the "waaahmbulance"? IBM spends HUGE amounts of money on R&D. I'm willing to bet that you learned more about rigour, process, how companies operate, and advanced computing principles in general during the time you worked there, than you contributed back with your 'great idea'. Consider your idea a payment for training and life experience that you couldn't beg/borrow/steal for in an academic institution.
If you didn't like the details of the contract, you didn't have to sign. If you think your 'great idea' would have seen the light of day based on garage experiments in isolation, more power to you.
As for IBM 'tricking' the open source community, that's a specious comment at best. Given that the source is 'open' and avaialble to all, how can IBM steal it? That's the whole point to open source in the first place.
I call BS on your logic. He's invited on CNN to discuss his book. CNN has declared him 'newsworthy'. Thus he has an opportunity to express an opinion in a public forum. When Stewart invites guests onto his show, there's some discussion of current events, but only for the purposes of comedy. John Stewart would not launch into such a diatribe if the Crossfire folks were guests on his show -- its a different forum. This, for example, is why there was a backlash against Rosie O'Donnell when she ambushed Tom Selleck years back on his NRA membership.
Face it, CNN had home field advantage and they got ANNIHILATED by a non-professional. A show about arguments for specious reasons...a comedian guest comes on with a REAL issue, and they folded like lawn chairs.
Ultimately, I think Stewart is having a greater and greater sense of guilt...he's realising his influence on people and their voting habits and recognises that this SHOULDN'T be the case. I think he just wants to be a comedian, but when faced with unexpected power, he's trying to be responsible with it.
Linux has more mindshare among corporate managers and business leaders. BSD is a very similar animal all things considered, but the minute you have to say "Berkley" to describe the product your business partners will run away screaming. "Some adolescant university pet project to run my core systems??? Are you nuts!?!?". Attempts are rationality are met with a Dilbert-esque anti-logic field that are impenetrable to all but the most diabolical methods (e.g. FUD, free golf games, vendor lunches).
With Sox404 and other corporate compliance issues, i think we'll see the rise of.PDFs in a big way. Yes you can protect Word documents, but.PDFs are considered a much more immutable form. The volume of.pdfs has increased 10x in the past 18 months as we've relied more and more on outsourcing... the best way of confirming exactly what you sent and external unit.
As a Canadian, I get the best of both worlds -- access to the vast selection of US media, both fictional and factual -- and a select amount of European news including the BBC and TV5 from France. Being Canadian I am fluent enough in french to understand alot of TV5's coverage.
It is sad to say that television broadcast journalism in the US is HORRIBLE. Its been steadily declining for years, but I've really noticed a huge drop-off in the past decade. Network broadcasts are talking heads that summarise events of the day with 5 second soundbites. There are no extended interviews or newsclips of actual coverage of political events anymore. Journal shows like 20/20 and 60 Minutes are sensationistic and rarely relate to hard journalism anymore. A low point was when 60 minutes fabricated evidence on car accidents a few years back; the latest CBS issue w/ forged documents re: Dubya does not surprise me in the least now. On MSNBC and CNN, talk-programs with 'experts' discussing the latest news, even though the hosts are chosen for bombastic attitudes and screen presence. Fox News is at the bottom of the barrel of the networks.
Fortunately, there are a few exceptions, mainly PBS programs. The McNeil/Lehrer (yeah, one retired) is probably the most scrupulous about what it presents day-to-day, and I'm a huge fan of Frontline. Frontline did a great, politically neutral, documentary on the unfolding of the Iraq crisis about 18 months ago which is still the best show I've seen on the subject
In comparison, daily news programs in Canada are much better researched and presented. Rumour is presented as rumour/unverified if its relevant to the story and needs reporting. BBC World Service is excellent. CBC's The National is still the bread'n'butter of nightly news for me. For differing coverage of world events you can also get "The Passionate Eye", a showcase of translated foreign press and documentaries. In Canada we're going to release Al Jazerra shortly so that we can see what the other side sees as well.
Ultimately I don't think that you can be a good citizen in the modern era without sampling a wide variety of opinion and viewpoint before making a decision at the ballot box. I will continue to watch US news from time to time, if only to gauge popular opinion in the US. But its been a long time since I've relied upon TV media for my 'facts'.
Just like nobody buys old black and white movies anymore?
If you look at volume of b&w TV shows vs volume of b&w DVD sales, you'll realise your comparison is not valid. The Jack Benny Program, one of the most popular TV shows of all time (and actually quite good) is barely available. Alot of b&w shows have been colourised to make them ~more~ consumer friendly. You and I both know its a stupid ploy, but shows like Friends have the forces of contemporary relevance; advertising; and latest broadcast resolution in their favour.
Probably half of my DVD collection is b&w Criterion films from the 1930s-1960s, but I only bought them because a) they were hard to find, and b) they were classics that bore the weight of repeated viewings. "Classic" materials will always be in vogue, but I'm personally looking forward to seeing 95% of TV shows dead and buried from re-runs/DVD re-releases in favour of good programming again. Its sad when you pine for the days of "The A-Team" and "Magnum P.I." in comparison to the dreck UPN or reality TV has provided us. Me, I'll stick to BBC re-runs on PBS and the Independent Film Channel until mainstream culture gets its head out of its a** and produces good work again.
AND and the end of it you still have the DVD sets. True, they're used, but there's still value ascribed to them, even if you only got 20% of their purchase value back when you sold them on eBay.
Broadcast provides you breadth of choice, but not depth -- not over the short term, anyways. And as a service model they keep making money from you month after month, and you retain nothing after the fact.
Seriously, once you can start getting 10 seasons of DVD quality material onto one single disc, it ~really~ puts things in perspective. I see two good things coming out of this:
1. Licensing non-sense for legacy audio-visual media goes away. Napster/Gnutella is a 60lb weakling compared to the Gorilla of 1 terrabyte optical storage. At today's prices, it makes sense for me to fly from Toronto to California, burn a few TV series of shows onto a disc, and fly back home -- it would be cheaper. Also, broadcast TV really beings to lose its luster when I have 20,000 hrs of video sitting on its shelf at home. I have 500 channels today, and its 99% garbage. I'd be much better off buying the shows i like in a static format, but the price point isn't quite there yet.
2. A new boom in television and film, as the new resolution and storage capacity gives way to much more impressive presentation. No one will be buying season 1 of The Simpsons when they can buy FAMILY GUY 3D in HDTV2.
Of course I'm wildly optimistic, and am not considering media conglomerate consolidation activities, DCMA III: Son of Thurmond, and media format wars. But on the whole I think the latent capability of the media will be strong enough to defeat corporatisation.
Actually, we're pretty much in line with our thinking. I can pick alot of holes apart in HP's itanium strategy, and IBM's Power series has its faults as well (you sound better versed with the details than I).
The point I was trying to make was that commodity attacks against Sun's product line hurt Sun MOST out of all those other vendors. HP saw the commoditisation and jumped for Intel...now they just need to execute (doubtful). IBM is working on a multi-tiered strategy.
I like the fact that Sun is talking AMD for discount 64, but when you talk to them they're pushing for a re-investment in Solaris on intel (to support cross-chipset consistency?). I think Solaris on intel is a tough sell -- if you're going commodity, linux will eat their lunch there.
If Sun is into linux, the question is: what is compelling about Sun's discount offerings? I doubt their ability to compete on price, they seem more keen on Solaris than Sun Linux, and if so where does this fit in their product roadmap? Nowhere.
It has been some time since Sun's technology has been equated as 'best of breed', probably going back to the Sparc III series. Most of their install base at this point is in a renewal cycle, or due to 3rd party support dependencies.
HP is betting the shop on commodity based 64 bit computing in Itanium, Itanium II, etc.
IBM has Power5, Power6, etc. A very solid roadmap after years of unix neglect in the 90s. Although Power4 was a bit weak, Power5 looks great and Power6 will definitely be on schedule. What is Sun's latest roadmap schedule? I can't remember, they keep changing the roadmap...
Finally, Sun = Solaris. HP is "Itanium = Linux, HP-UX, or MS products". IBM is "AIX, or Linux, or whatever you want to run on our hardware...we won't stop you."
Itanium = Intel manufacturing. I prefer AMD, but either way both manufacturers have huge investments in numerous tiers of chip manufacture...they can get economies of scale. IBM saw this deficiency, and got new partners. X-Box, PS2, Ninentdo = PowerPC series. Same with Apple. THey've diversified their manufacturing lines.
Sun, on the other hand, now has to consolidate its own market share through a dependence upon Fujitsu now.
Make no mistake -- everything Sun does is about their hardware. And the market is commoditising itself, whether Sun wants to or not. Solaris is a good OS, but I wouldn't pick my hardware based on it. And the best thing is that whatever Solaris can do, the Open Source community can mimick (better) 2-4 years down the line. There is no compelling reason to be bleeding edge all the time, especially in corporate environments...
In short: I haven't seen Sun win an RFI with any company based on technical merits alone in a very very long time. Pricing discounts and enticements yes, but that eats into their bottom line ~alot~, and they can't afford it.
So basically, 4+ years later the market still hasn't recovered. And ignore the ups and downs of the markets in the past 2-3 years, we're exactly where we started.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually cancelled my subscription to the Globe and Mail for sponsoring her articles about 7 years ago. Mean and vindictive, she had no place in journalism. She's a shrew and a thoroughly despicable person. Although it might be only me, I remember getting the impression that she was a bit of a Chinese communist sympathiser, so her writing an article on the technology 'innovations' of China does not surprise me.
Regarding innovation, you are 100% correct -- that is the US' prime advantage. That plus abundant natural resources which can be exported, or at least support self-sufficiency. Even regarding oil, I believe the US only gets 30% of its supply from OPEC.
Fortunately China is beholden to the US still in many regards. Its needs the US markets to sell products too; it relies upon the US currency to supply economic stability and prevent inflation in China while they go through this boom; and they need North America to provide raw materials and resources. We're a long way from the sunsetting of the American empire, but the US will be facing a new world power as a competitor (if its not already).
I'm Canadian and not overly familiar with the Ohio political landscape; I'm basing most of my info learned in the past 48 hours off of the big 3 networks + PBS + Salon.com + CNN.com.
The lower the # of outstanding votes in the provisional & absentee category, the much more likely it retains a 50/50 split.
The opportunity for 'hope against hope' would be if the provisional ballots were close to historical highs or higher, say the 250k+ range. The theory goes that all the stumping done in the last week to 'get out of the vote' (e.g. Paul Newman going door-to-door) in Cleveland -- traditionally democratic -- might have uncovered a disproportiately high number of net-new democratic votes.
So two factors in play: 1) how big is that pool of provisional votes, 2) why are people provisionally voting? I think #1 will be close to the margin of the Bush victory as it stands, so this is an irrelevant discussion point.
Interestingly, Cincinatti is -so- Republican historically that even FDR never won the popular vote in that city. Ohio is an interesting battle ground state since it seems to have a wide diversity of voting blocks. Rural, industrial urban, white collar urban, and a sizeable boomer-suburbian population as well.
Looks like Kerry took the high road and decided to avoid a long drawn out affair. New Mexico and Iowa don't mean anything at this point, with Ohio representing the presidency.
I've seen reports of anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 provisional votes, plus absentee ballots, plus recounts where necessary, still all hanging in the balance. Its a slim chance, but Kerry could still possibly win it if he pressed ahead with a long, drawn out legal battle. I'm assuming that his concession is a statement that he will not lead the Democrats down that road for the good of the country.
Ohio still has the responsibility of counting those ballots, though.
Well, I work at a Canadian bank and we've had to stop outsourcing alot of our contingency server hosting to the US. Given certain provisions and interpretations of the PATRIOT act, we cannot guarantee privacy of personal data to our customers -- as we must do as indicated by Canadian law. So now instead of having a primary datacentre in Toronto and a backup in South Carolina, we're moving everything out west to Alberta. We still run servers and call centres in the US, but all the data warehousing is now 100% Canadian.
So, if you work in IT, I suspect alot of people have been indirectly affected but don't realise it. I doubt you'll have SWAT teams bursting into your house and seizing your home PC due to using Kazaa, but the aggregate affect over the entire economy is tough to measure.
Paraphrashing Ganhdi, "if we rely upon eye-for-an-eye justice, the whole world will end up blind."
Corporations are big, confusing entities. They're byzantine. Sometimes one individual, or team, or department, or DIVSION, exercise a strategy inconsistent or in competition with the corporation's main objective. How many times have you gone to work, looked at a project, and wondered "what the HELL are they doing?!?!?".
In this case, cooler heads prevailed and the situation was rectified. I don't think that Nintendo should be penalised for correcting a mistake. They were even gracious about it.
Fair enough, i'll admit I was using a relatively large brush to paint the Bush administration. I'm just surprised that it took a decade for our currency to drop from $0.80 to $0.60, and then has bounced back in 12-18 months to above $0.80 -- current estimates are targeting a $0.85-0.90 Canadian dolalr.
The massive amounts of US government deficet spending have to be contributing to this in a big way. Outsourcing (thanks India, China) and offshore manufacturing (thanks Walmart) would contribute to this as well though, you're right. These later items are certianly heavily influenced by the American consumer.
Well, our dollar has appreciated against the US $ recently. At the beginning of 2004 it was in the range of $0.63-65, now its $0.82! If you want a good example of how your president has destroyed your economy, take a look at the valuation of your $ vs the rest of the world.
However, in retrospect Canada's $ was undervalued for quite awhile, and this is the MAIN reason why filming came here. Same type of cities and infrastructure as the US, but your money went 1.5x as far. All the BS about subsidies is just that -- if it was true California would have lobbied under NAFTA a long time ago (and lost).
No fair -- I browse Slashdot when at work, with a locked down desktop. When at home I used Firefox out of personal choice, but then I'm usually browsing other sites.
Note: "Other" does not mean PR0N.
Note2: Ok, "does not necessarily mean PR0N".
Note3: Ok, "in the majority of cases does not mean PR0N".
Note4: OK OK OK. "does not exclusively mean PR0N".
I agree with all your points. I actually meant 1860s, I just made a typo. You're right that the south took many years to recover from some brutal campaigns, and black vs white violence continued well into the 20th century.
Given longtime ongoing tension between the northern and southern states, this conflict was probably inevitable.
The interesting thing is that Europe had pretty much ignored the US Civil war and thus missed alot of the lessons of modern industrialised warfare. WWI trench warfare was not difficult to predict if you're familiar with the sieges of Richmond and Atlanta, for example.
This is modded as funny, but I'm sure that Native Americans or the southern states that democratically elected to leave the union would agree with "lincoln was a dictator".
Civil rights and abolition of slavery were later incorporated into the justification for the war, as the body count rose and the South under some brilliant military leadership retained the initiative. "Slavery" is the kindergarden version recounted to try and justify the self-mutilation the US underwent in the 1870s. There's even a joke about this in The Simpsons when Apu applies for US citizenship...The fact remains that if the southern states were justified in leaving the British Empire, they were similarly justified in leaving the Union.
I'm not one for hero worship...Lincoln was a very good leader, but he definitely improved as the war carried on. I'm glad the North won, and the US turned into a much better, recognisable nation after the civil war.
The only movie where a director was given unprecedented control and produced an all-time classic, that i can think of, was Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. Of course, this ignores the fact that his previous 2 attempts -- heart of darkenss, the golden bough(iirc?) -- were left on the cutting room floor. Its success also ruined his hollywood career and he never again reached such heights.
:/
i can't decide if I'd rather have immediate greatness and then suffer 50 years of decline, or enjoy moderate success over a lifetime.
Don't forget Leigh Brackett's hands in scripting the dialogue portions of the screenplay. The movie works in my mind because it has a gritty, fatalistic feel similar to many film noir movies -- where Brackett cut her teeth.
Attack of the Clones proved to me that Lucas can't write dialogue to save his life. I think the mistake Lucas has made with the new trilogy is tryin to do too much. He's wealthy beyond imagination, and can make whatever movie he wants -- a bad combination for a director. Directing requires collaboration. Time and again great directors have made horrible, overbloated bombs when given carte blanche, even with proven track records. Look at Lucas' contemporaries....
Spielberg - 1941; Cimino - Heaven's Gate; Coppola - Apocalypse Now is a good film, but it 'broke' him as a director. Aside from maybe Dracula, he's never met the standards of Godfather or AN; Scorcese - Gangs of New York; Polanski - Pirates. I could list another 30 or 40, but you get the point...
Should i call you the "waaahmbulance"? IBM spends HUGE amounts of money on R&D. I'm willing to bet that you learned more about rigour, process, how companies operate, and advanced computing principles in general during the time you worked there, than you contributed back with your 'great idea'. Consider your idea a payment for training and life experience that you couldn't beg/borrow/steal for in an academic institution.
If you didn't like the details of the contract, you didn't have to sign. If you think your 'great idea' would have seen the light of day based on garage experiments in isolation, more power to you.
As for IBM 'tricking' the open source community, that's a specious comment at best. Given that the source is 'open' and avaialble to all, how can IBM steal it? That's the whole point to open source in the first place.
Sorry, only half marks for that old chestnut. You get full points if you work in RIM ~and~ Steve Jobs for the double-pun.
e.g.
Q: "What would happen if Apple Steve Jobs bought RIM?"
A: "Then he'd become RIM Jobs!"
For my next horrible joke, I'll need some racial stereotypes and a latrine...
I call BS on your logic. He's invited on CNN to discuss his book. CNN has declared him 'newsworthy'. Thus he has an opportunity to express an opinion in a public forum. When Stewart invites guests onto his show, there's some discussion of current events, but only for the purposes of comedy. John Stewart would not launch into such a diatribe if the Crossfire folks were guests on his show -- its a different forum. This, for example, is why there was a backlash against Rosie O'Donnell when she ambushed Tom Selleck years back on his NRA membership.
Face it, CNN had home field advantage and they got ANNIHILATED by a non-professional. A show about arguments for specious reasons...a comedian guest comes on with a REAL issue, and they folded like lawn chairs.
Ultimately, I think Stewart is having a greater and greater sense of guilt...he's realising his influence on people and their voting habits and recognises that this SHOULDN'T be the case. I think he just wants to be a comedian, but when faced with unexpected power, he's trying to be responsible with it.
Linux has more mindshare among corporate managers and business leaders. BSD is a very similar animal all things considered, but the minute you have to say "Berkley" to describe the product your business partners will run away screaming. "Some adolescant university pet project to run my core systems??? Are you nuts!?!?". Attempts are rationality are met with a Dilbert-esque anti-logic field that are impenetrable to all but the most diabolical methods (e.g. FUD, free golf games, vendor lunches).
With Sox404 and other corporate compliance issues, i think we'll see the rise of .PDFs in a big way. Yes you can protect Word documents, but .PDFs are considered a much more immutable form. The volume of .pdfs has increased 10x in the past 18 months as we've relied more and more on outsourcing... the best way of confirming exactly what you sent and external unit.
As a Canadian, I get the best of both worlds -- access to the vast selection of US media, both fictional and factual -- and a select amount of European news including the BBC and TV5 from France. Being Canadian I am fluent enough in french to understand alot of TV5's coverage.
It is sad to say that television broadcast journalism in the US is HORRIBLE. Its been steadily declining for years, but I've really noticed a huge drop-off in the past decade. Network broadcasts are talking heads that summarise events of the day with 5 second soundbites. There are no extended interviews or newsclips of actual coverage of political events anymore. Journal shows like 20/20 and 60 Minutes are sensationistic and rarely relate to hard journalism anymore. A low point was when 60 minutes fabricated evidence on car accidents a few years back; the latest CBS issue w/ forged documents re: Dubya does not surprise me in the least now. On MSNBC and CNN, talk-programs with 'experts' discussing the latest news, even though the hosts are chosen for bombastic attitudes and screen presence. Fox News is at the bottom of the barrel of the networks.
Fortunately, there are a few exceptions, mainly PBS programs. The McNeil/Lehrer (yeah, one retired) is probably the most scrupulous about what it presents day-to-day, and I'm a huge fan of Frontline. Frontline did a great, politically neutral, documentary on the unfolding of the Iraq crisis about 18 months ago which is still the best show I've seen on the subject
In comparison, daily news programs in Canada are much better researched and presented. Rumour is presented as rumour/unverified if its relevant to the story and needs reporting. BBC World Service is excellent. CBC's The National is still the bread'n'butter of nightly news for me. For differing coverage of world events you can also get "The Passionate Eye", a showcase of translated foreign press and documentaries. In Canada we're going to release Al Jazerra shortly so that we can see what the other side sees as well.
Ultimately I don't think that you can be a good citizen in the modern era without sampling a wide variety of opinion and viewpoint before making a decision at the ballot box. I will continue to watch US news from time to time, if only to gauge popular opinion in the US. But its been a long time since I've relied upon TV media for my 'facts'.
Too bad no one has a defuse kit... :(
Just like nobody buys old black and white movies anymore?
If you look at volume of b&w TV shows vs volume of b&w DVD sales, you'll realise your comparison is not valid. The Jack Benny Program, one of the most popular TV shows of all time (and actually quite good) is barely available. Alot of b&w shows have been colourised to make them ~more~ consumer friendly. You and I both know its a stupid ploy, but shows like Friends have the forces of contemporary relevance; advertising; and latest broadcast resolution in their favour.
Probably half of my DVD collection is b&w Criterion films from the 1930s-1960s, but I only bought them because a) they were hard to find, and b) they were classics that bore the weight of repeated viewings. "Classic" materials will always be in vogue, but I'm personally looking forward to seeing 95% of TV shows dead and buried from re-runs/DVD re-releases in favour of good programming again. Its sad when you pine for the days of "The A-Team" and "Magnum P.I." in comparison to the dreck UPN or reality TV has provided us. Me, I'll stick to BBC re-runs on PBS and the Independent Film Channel until mainstream culture gets its head out of its a** and produces good work again.
AND and the end of it you still have the DVD sets. True, they're used, but there's still value ascribed to them, even if you only got 20% of their purchase value back when you sold them on eBay.
Broadcast provides you breadth of choice, but not depth -- not over the short term, anyways. And as a service model they keep making money from you month after month, and you retain nothing after the fact.
Seriously, once you can start getting 10 seasons of DVD quality material onto one single disc, it ~really~ puts things in perspective. I see two good things coming out of this:
1. Licensing non-sense for legacy audio-visual media goes away. Napster/Gnutella is a 60lb weakling compared to the Gorilla of 1 terrabyte optical storage. At today's prices, it makes sense for me to fly from Toronto to California, burn a few TV series of shows onto a disc, and fly back home -- it would be cheaper. Also, broadcast TV really beings to lose its luster when I have 20,000 hrs of video sitting on its shelf at home. I have 500 channels today, and its 99% garbage. I'd be much better off buying the shows i like in a static format, but the price point isn't quite there yet.
2. A new boom in television and film, as the new resolution and storage capacity gives way to much more impressive presentation. No one will be buying season 1 of The Simpsons when they can buy FAMILY GUY 3D in HDTV2.
Of course I'm wildly optimistic, and am not considering media conglomerate consolidation activities, DCMA III: Son of Thurmond, and media format wars. But on the whole I think the latent capability of the media will be strong enough to defeat corporatisation.
Actually, we're pretty much in line with our thinking. I can pick alot of holes apart in HP's itanium strategy, and IBM's Power series has its faults as well (you sound better versed with the details than I).
The point I was trying to make was that commodity attacks against Sun's product line hurt Sun MOST out of all those other vendors. HP saw the commoditisation and jumped for Intel...now they just need to execute (doubtful). IBM is working on a multi-tiered strategy.
I like the fact that Sun is talking AMD for discount 64, but when you talk to them they're pushing for a re-investment in Solaris on intel (to support cross-chipset consistency?). I think Solaris on intel is a tough sell -- if you're going commodity, linux will eat their lunch there.
If Sun is into linux, the question is: what is compelling about Sun's discount offerings? I doubt their ability to compete on price, they seem more keen on Solaris than Sun Linux, and if so where does this fit in their product roadmap? Nowhere.
It has been some time since Sun's technology has been equated as 'best of breed', probably going back to the Sparc III series. Most of their install base at this point is in a renewal cycle, or due to 3rd party support dependencies.
HP is betting the shop on commodity based 64 bit computing in Itanium, Itanium II, etc.
IBM has Power5, Power6, etc. A very solid roadmap after years of unix neglect in the 90s. Although Power4 was a bit weak, Power5 looks great and Power6 will definitely be on schedule. What is Sun's latest roadmap schedule? I can't remember, they keep changing the roadmap...
Finally, Sun = Solaris. HP is "Itanium = Linux, HP-UX, or MS products". IBM is "AIX, or Linux, or whatever you want to run on our hardware...we won't stop you."
Itanium = Intel manufacturing. I prefer AMD, but either way both manufacturers have huge investments in numerous tiers of chip manufacture...they can get economies of scale. IBM saw this deficiency, and got new partners. X-Box, PS2, Ninentdo = PowerPC series. Same with Apple. THey've diversified their manufacturing lines.
Sun, on the other hand, now has to consolidate its own market share through a dependence upon Fujitsu now.
Make no mistake -- everything Sun does is about their hardware. And the market is commoditising itself, whether Sun wants to or not. Solaris is a good OS, but I wouldn't pick my hardware based on it. And the best thing is that whatever Solaris can do, the Open Source community can mimick (better) 2-4 years down the line. There is no compelling reason to be bleeding edge all the time, especially in corporate environments...
In short: I haven't seen Sun win an RFI with any company based on technical merits alone in a very very long time. Pricing discounts and enticements yes, but that eats into their bottom line ~alot~, and they can't afford it.
My dates were a bit off, but basically since 2002 the Dow is back to where it started.
And the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 are about the same.
So basically, 4+ years later the market still hasn't recovered. And ignore the ups and downs of the markets in the past 2-3 years, we're exactly where we started.