The Nokia is or was the same company, they were an old finish industrial that happened to get in at the ground floor of the cellular wave. And I think there was a lawsuit between Apple records and Apple computer.
The one thing geoducks are good at is digging, I am trying to remember how fast they dig, it was something like 7th grade Washington history class, but I think it could dig itself into the sand at a rapid rate, however a google search informs me that my teacher lied, they merely retract their long necks into the sand. I have heard that they make good eating, but its my opinion that anything that looks that much like a banana slug should not be eaten.
Why do people assume that the rich destroy economies for their gain? Looking at the Forbes list of super rich: Bill Gates, is probably the most argueable destroyer of value,yet he made his employees better off, his customers are better off than they had been, of only due to the fact that they got to buy cheap PCs instead of expensive Apples and other proprietary hardware formats. Finally, software is either sold as a monopoly or given away, it costs nothing to distribute, but has high costs to create, if you don't exert monopoly rents, you will not cover your development costs.
Warren Buffet, if you can construe him as a destroyer of the economy, I'll certainly listen.
The Walton clan holds most of the other slots, and while they probably do hurt small retail shops, those shops were surviving on market power, since it was expensive to compare prices between towns. Also, they profit on lower than industry average distribution costs.
All of these companies have given more to the economy than they took, because you will not be sustainably wealthy without doing something better than your competitors. The only exceptions to this are situations of natural monopoly where one competitor just happens to be the survivor, this might be true of AT&T and Microsoft.
There have been many extortion artists who profited, however, those were merely the same bucketshop scams perpitrated on a grand scale. Bucket shops are small finance companies, that use very high pressure sales tactics to sell penny stocks, stocks priced in the under $5 range, which they manipulate the market. They usually either own the stocks and sell from their own accounts. These were the majority of the financial scams perpetrated from Wall Street, the telecommunications bubble provided a nice method for the bigger players to join in the game, through public offerings. Also, the switch from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution retirement plans, put a large amount of capital in the hands of many uneducated and naieve investors. Those scamsters weren't creating wealth any more than the common burglar does when he robs a home. They will always be here perpetrating their crimes, but will probably return to being small again, now that most people got burned with their retirement savings. They won't destroy the economy, and most of them probably will be left with wealth, but not the sort of wealth that will allow them to do much on the economic scale.
Finally, on the tech sector, with the exception of software, semiconductors, and possibly services, which are more unique, most of it is not far removed from any other manufacturing, and you can likely expect to experience a trend similar to that of the low tech manufacturing industries did in the 1960s and 1970s. Think of the 1950s as the same boom years for cars and airplanes.
No that is just the sign of an old business model. Grocery stores have operated on razor thin margins for quite some time, and successfully, you just don't have much margin for error. They are worried that their circulars will get into the hands of a competitor who can then change their prices to a penny or two below their current ones, leaving them with higher prices across the board. They all over build during the good times, and are now worried about Wal-Mart's entry into that business nationally, and want to show that they are not losing many sales to Wal-Mart yet.
Too much competition is the signal that there has been too much investment in an industry, and some should be put into other industries. It certainly benefits consumers. I think competition is alive and well in good times and bad, its just that selection and services (think short lines and easy access) become more important than just low prices.
5s and 10s indicate clearance items, they usually have a red tag as well, I don't know what the nines are. Could be just something to set them apart from their competitors.
Strategic necisity has been used in almost every industry to subsidize it from foreign competition. RAM makers were using it in the 80s when Japan was the developing cheap production place. I didn't say stop farming in the first world, just buy from the cheap producers. There will be some domestic farms that will be productive enough to compete with imported food. Or the compete on something other than price, one of the local farms here happens to also make bread under their own brand which has been quite profitable for them. They only recently got enough land (I think it was in the 8000-10000 acre range) that the farm would have been profitable on its own, there is no reason to continue paying the small farms to remain in business. Why do we support thousands of less productive farmers at the cost of subsistance farmers in the third world? How can we expect peace and prosperity to just arise there, if everytime there is a cost advantage in another country the rich country supports its more costly production under the guise of national security? We currently importing other stratigic materials like oil, platinium, and palladium. Why not food?
I think hackers are more noticable in computers because it's so much newer, the gearheads of the car world have sucked all of the easy additional performance out of cars, but Linux shows how a kid can rival the biggest companies in the production of software. In a few decades when we have gathered the "low hanging fruit" there will still be a few hackers in computing, but most will have moved onto nanotech or biology or something completely not even imagined yet.
You are exactly right, the cheapest phones, the ones given away for free with a contract, are about $100 wholesale, the average discount from the wholesale price is between $100 and $150, in the US, its lower in the European countries that have higher penetration rates, because of pre-paid plans, and higher subsidies don't do much to attract the remaining holdouts.
Great now we will get "spanish prisoner" scams from India and other countries as well. : ) While they mention that it could be used to check government papers, and commodity prices, I have to wonder if this will truly be useful. I would be surprised if the grapevine isn't pretty accurate in relaying crop price info, and how often do you need to access government documents in a country with per capita income in the $100 per year range, you probably still have to travel into the city to bribe the official to get what you want done anyway. These simputers seem pretty pie in the sky to me, but if they really do improve lives more power to them. It seems to me this money would be better spend on water purification, literacy programs, or other human capital efforts.
A better solution would be to eliminate crop subsidies in the US, Japan, and Western Europe and buy our crops from these countries. They would cost less, and cut our tax bills. I realize it would eliminate many jobs here and in Europe, but it would save consumers more, and I'm sure a US cotton farmer can find another job better than an Indian, African, or South American sugar, corn, or cotton farmer. It seems odd to me, that the poorest farmers in the world are generally taxed, while the richest farmers recieve government aid.
I can understand that someone doesn't like cookies reporting info to others, but why is ad blocking mentioned in an article about privacy. If the ads are served up, with no communication from the user, that was not authorized from the user, it is not a privacy issue. An annoyance issue it may be, but that is what you get for free content.
Belive me I know the two are quite different, since I bought a 530 mobo and then learned that I need a bunch of other Dell only parts to build a system. The powersupply is a big flat thing that makes up the base of the cases. I was thinking mostly about the processors and OS, which as best I can tell are pretty similar to their consumer grade versions, maybe like Honda and Acura or something. There is a large difference between some of the other components, but most of it is price, if you pick up a Dimention, and add a boatload of RAM, one of the new 3 Ghz processors and your U320 Raid cards you would probably be close to the Precision, maybe not quite as stable, and you might need a better powersupply. And you would probably save some money Dell wants $4500 for 4 gigs of DDR SDRAM, I'm sure you could find that on the after market for about half that price once it gets added to the various memory companies' pages. The drives were more competitive, and I don't know what Xeons go for so I'll assume that it is pretty close. I realize that the power supply and motherboard require some special features, but how different, in terms of extra work for Intel and Microsoft are Xeons and Windows Professional? By the way, a fully tricked out Precision with the new Chipset and all the goodies gets exceeds $20,000.
Not PC, Workstation, thse still have SCSI, and other cool toys. I know there isn't much diference between a Dell Precision and a nice Dell Dimension, but there was until a few years ago. There were many low cost OSes around, and IBM really gave away the farm, but it was MS that happened to be at the right place at the right time. And their OS was useable enough for both the general userbase and programmers to pickup one of those newfangled PCs and find that they were worth something. Moore's law should have worked for the other companies as well. The point of my story was that both Microsoft and Intel have some market power over their parts of the PC, and both extended thier market power into the workstation market. However, even though the two companies continued to exert monopoly rents from their Workstation customers, those customers were better off then they had been under the previous more competitive market place.
A competitive market does not a happy economist make. Imagine a world in which there never was a Microsoft. However, in this imagnination, I place a caveat, there was no Microsoft, because there was no PC. While there is a competitive market for each of the many standards of computers, none has more than a few percentage points of market share, and since they all must cover their very high research and development costs with very few unit sales each computer costs, several thousand dollars, and they don't work together very well. Where are consumers better off in that world with no monopolist, or in ours where their is one? Yes, monopolists do create efficiency losses, but they can improve utility for consumers. By the way, the Workstation market, is pretty similar to the no Microsoft world I described. About 10 years ago, the typical workstation cost $20,000. About 5 years ago, the first PC based workstations were introduced. Now the average workstation costs less than $7,000, both Unix systems and Windows based workstations have fallen in price since the introduction, and Microsoft is collecting monopoly rents on those copies of Windows that go in the workstations. I doubt most workstaion buyers would prefer the pre monopolist market to the market of today.
Re:This sounds much like an advertisement...
on
Step 2, Groceries
·
· Score: 1
I found that I have more free time once I graduated, than I did in college. Not that I did much homework in college, at least after I left engineering, but I usually had around 25 ish hours of classes and a few labs, but they were usually scattered around my schedule, and including transit times, and a 10-15 hr per week part time job, I was busy from 8-5. After this I usually spent around 10 hours a week working on projects, and in group meetings, which were generally unproductive on the Dilbert managment scale. Now, I am busy from 8-5, but all other times are my own. I rarely have to bring work home, and I get comp time if a meeting goes late or something.
I am using windows 2000 currently, and have been a windows user for almost all of my computing experience. I keep using it for several reasons, but primarily because MS gave me the licensed disk, a rep came to our campus and passed them out to students, the meetings were only advertized in the CS wing of the campus, but they never asked about majors. So this removed one of the major advantages of Linux over windows, cost. Win2k is more than stable enough for my needs, and I haven't had any major security problems yet, although I'm certainly not advertizing my IP just in case.
I have run Linux in the past, even on my main computer, and while it was an excellent OS, star office 5.2 for linux was much slower than the windows version, it was un useable on my P133, which was my only PC at the time. I needed an office suite, of at least that capability, si I had to switch back. I realize that Open office and SO 6 are probably much better now but really like Win2k.
I like it because I play the occasional game, and most of them seem to run much better on Windows, if on anything else. It also comes in handy at work, where we use Windows, and I end up being the quick problem guy, our tech is usually busy, and I'm next door, so my officemates, usually pop in to get some help. I do run Linux on my second PC, but I don't boot it as often as the Windows one.
In the future, I am thinking that my next PC will either be an old workstation, hopefully an Alpha (21264 if I can find one) or a Mac, MacOS just looks nice, although HP's Power stuff gets pretty cheap on the used market too. If those hammer's, or Opeterons, or what ever are cheap enough I might build something based on that instead. If I run an old workstation, I will probably have to run the UNIX flavor that their supposed to, or maybe BSD, I don't know about Linux on the PA stuff, but Linux on the alpha's works pretty well. A Mac would run OS X, of course, and the hammers would probably get my Win2k again, maybe linux.
If I do any server level stuff, I am thinking about a client server level system in my next place. Silent, flash or similar clients in strategic places with a main server somewhere, and possibly one real PC in a den or something, the server will probably run Linux.
Those are just my current leanings, and they could change tomorrow with new information.
2 years ago in Redmond...
"Hey Bill, I think I finally understand your plan for this console thingy."
1)Create gaiming platform.
2)Accept losses while platform becomes dominant.
3)Losses, however they remain smaller than our interest.
4)Slowly roll out new productivity services under a subscription.
5)Profit, from subscription services to Office, the internet, and a small cut of every online sale. Also, anyone who wants to interact with our millions console access customers will have to purchase.Net enterprise services.
"Very good Steve" [pat] [pat].
"Thanks Bill, can I go dance for the developers again?" "Pleeease?"
"All right, Steve, you have been a good figurehead for some time."
Your age, wasn't that only about three years ago?
I bet your 300a will last another 4 years, at which time it won't be too slow, but your caps will all leak and your system will explode.;-)
You know some case maker should add a turbo button, just so I can push it and feel better when im doing something CPU intensive. It would be extra cool, if it oc'ed the processor when you pushed it.
They blocked the satalite mergers, because they would not have any competitors in most rural areas. Going from two competitors to one, usualy has pretty drastic effects on the competitive landscape. While those in the cities could switch to cable if the combined company raised prices, many rural dwellers could not. The cable companies are usually monopolies because they have a local right granted by a city to be the only cable company. These were designed to get the cable built, otherwise very densly populated areas, several hundered homes per mile, would have many cable companies serving them and everyone else would have none.
Because the cable companies don't really compete with each other exept in population dense areas, where the sat, companies also both compete, this was viewed as adding little to the compined company's market power. A city that was served by one of the companies will still be served by one of the companies. The cable companies are also currently classified as competitors to the local phone monopolies, when you add all these competitors together, the FCC decided that this would not reduce competition much.
Finally, the abrasivness of the EchoStar CEO probably did more than anything else to turn regulators off towards the merger. He is pretty brash, and well you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
It happened, but I think it was before the eighties, I remember buying them in the early eighties. Rental was a PITA, because it was really expensive. This was one of the ways AT&T collected their monopoly rents. Where do you think all the money came from to throw at things like Bell Labs, its obvious that Lucent never made any money once the monopoly teat was taken away. Western Electric was the AT&T company that made the phones you had to rent. I believe that you were allowed to own a phone, but it wasn't allowed ot interfere with the network, and ma' bell was pretty slow to approve any phones that wouldn't interfere with the network. They did similar things to the long distance companies, preventing them from accessing their local networks without costly equipment, but that is what brought about the lawsuit that ended with the breakup agreement. Of course those were the days, when long distance calls were more of a luxury. Its ironic that AT&T more or less got to decide how to split up the company, but still gave away all the powerful parts of the monopoly. They kept the then profitable long distance business, Bell Labs, and NCR. Only after it became appearant that the local loops were where the monopoly power was, did AT&T start buying cable companies for rich valuations, hoping to create a local network to compete with the companies they gave away in the settlement.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nokia is or was the same company, they were an old finish industrial that happened to get in at the ground floor of the cellular wave. And I think there was a lawsuit between Apple records and Apple computer.
The one thing geoducks are good at is digging, I am trying to remember how fast they dig, it was something like 7th grade Washington history class, but I think it could dig itself into the sand at a rapid rate, however a google search informs me that my teacher lied, they merely retract their long necks into the sand. I have heard that they make good eating, but its my opinion that anything that looks that much like a banana slug should not be eaten.
Why do people assume that the rich destroy economies for their gain? Looking at the Forbes list of super rich:
Bill Gates, is probably the most argueable destroyer of value,yet he made his employees better off, his customers are better off than they had been, of only due to the fact that they got to buy cheap PCs instead of expensive Apples and other proprietary hardware formats. Finally, software is either sold as a monopoly or given away, it costs nothing to distribute, but has high costs to create, if you don't exert monopoly rents, you will not cover your development costs.
Warren Buffet, if you can construe him as a destroyer of the economy, I'll certainly listen.
The Walton clan holds most of the other slots, and while they probably do hurt small retail shops, those shops were surviving on market power, since it was expensive to compare prices between towns. Also, they profit on lower than industry average distribution costs.
All of these companies have given more to the economy than they took, because you will not be sustainably wealthy without doing something better than your competitors. The only exceptions to this are situations of natural monopoly where one competitor just happens to be the survivor, this might be true of AT&T and Microsoft.
There have been many extortion artists who profited, however, those were merely the same bucketshop scams perpitrated on a grand scale. Bucket shops are small finance companies, that use very high pressure sales tactics to sell penny stocks, stocks priced in the under $5 range, which they manipulate the market. They usually either own the stocks and sell from their own accounts. These were the majority of the financial scams perpetrated from Wall Street, the telecommunications bubble provided a nice method for the bigger players to join in the game, through public offerings. Also, the switch from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution retirement plans, put a large amount of capital in the hands of many uneducated and naieve investors. Those scamsters weren't creating wealth any more than the common burglar does when he robs a home. They will always be here perpetrating their crimes, but will probably return to being small again, now that most people got burned with their retirement savings. They won't destroy the economy, and most of them probably will be left with wealth, but not the sort of wealth that will allow them to do much on the economic scale.
Finally, on the tech sector, with the exception of software, semiconductors, and possibly services, which are more unique, most of it is not far removed from any other manufacturing, and you can likely expect to experience a trend similar to that of the low tech manufacturing industries did in the 1960s and 1970s. Think of the 1950s as the same boom years for cars and airplanes.
No that is just the sign of an old business model. Grocery stores have operated on razor thin margins for quite some time, and successfully, you just don't have much margin for error. They are worried that their circulars will get into the hands of a competitor who can then change their prices to a penny or two below their current ones, leaving them with higher prices across the board. They all over build during the good times, and are now worried about Wal-Mart's entry into that business nationally, and want to show that they are not losing many sales to Wal-Mart yet. Too much competition is the signal that there has been too much investment in an industry, and some should be put into other industries. It certainly benefits consumers. I think competition is alive and well in good times and bad, its just that selection and services (think short lines and easy access) become more important than just low prices.
5s and 10s indicate clearance items, they usually have a red tag as well, I don't know what the nines are. Could be just something to set them apart from their competitors.
Strategic necisity has been used in almost every industry to subsidize it from foreign competition. RAM makers were using it in the 80s when Japan was the developing cheap production place. I didn't say stop farming in the first world, just buy from the cheap producers. There will be some domestic farms that will be productive enough to compete with imported food. Or the compete on something other than price, one of the local farms here happens to also make bread under their own brand which has been quite profitable for them. They only recently got enough land (I think it was in the 8000-10000 acre range) that the farm would have been profitable on its own, there is no reason to continue paying the small farms to remain in business. Why do we support thousands of less productive farmers at the cost of subsistance farmers in the third world? How can we expect peace and prosperity to just arise there, if everytime there is a cost advantage in another country the rich country supports its more costly production under the guise of national security? We currently importing other stratigic materials like oil, platinium, and palladium. Why not food?
I think hackers are more noticable in computers because it's so much newer, the gearheads of the car world have sucked all of the easy additional performance out of cars, but Linux shows how a kid can rival the biggest companies in the production of software. In a few decades when we have gathered the "low hanging fruit" there will still be a few hackers in computing, but most will have moved onto nanotech or biology or something completely not even imagined yet.
The UI on this has some special features to allow easier interaction with those who are illiterate.
You are exactly right, the cheapest phones, the ones given away for free with a contract, are about $100 wholesale, the average discount from the wholesale price is between $100 and $150, in the US, its lower in the European countries that have higher penetration rates, because of pre-paid plans, and higher subsidies don't do much to attract the remaining holdouts.
Great now we will get "spanish prisoner" scams from India and other countries as well. : )
While they mention that it could be used to check government papers, and commodity prices, I have to wonder if this will truly be useful. I would be surprised if the grapevine isn't pretty accurate in relaying crop price info, and how often do you need to access government documents in a country with per capita income in the $100 per year range, you probably still have to travel into the city to bribe the official to get what you want done anyway. These simputers seem pretty pie in the sky to me, but if they really do improve lives more power to them. It seems to me this money would be better spend on water purification, literacy programs, or other human capital efforts.
A better solution would be to eliminate crop subsidies in the US, Japan, and Western Europe and buy our crops from these countries. They would cost less, and cut our tax bills. I realize it would eliminate many jobs here and in Europe, but it would save consumers more, and I'm sure a US cotton farmer can find another job better than an Indian, African, or South American sugar, corn, or cotton farmer. It seems odd to me, that the poorest farmers in the world are generally taxed, while the richest farmers recieve government aid.
Actually, its cash flow, or lack of it. A company can be unprofitable, but remain in business, but it won't last long with negative cash flow.
I can understand that someone doesn't like cookies reporting info to others, but why is ad blocking mentioned in an article about privacy. If the ads are served up, with no communication from the user, that was not authorized from the user, it is not a privacy issue. An annoyance issue it may be, but that is what you get for free content.
That was a weather balloon, nothing to see here, please go about your business. Have a nice day.
You are right. They caught an earlier ice bridge. =)
Belive me I know the two are quite different, since I bought a 530 mobo and then learned that I need a bunch of other Dell only parts to build a system. The powersupply is a big flat thing that makes up the base of the cases. I was thinking mostly about the processors and OS, which as best I can tell are pretty similar to their consumer grade versions, maybe like Honda and Acura or something. There is a large difference between some of the other components, but most of it is price, if you pick up a Dimention, and add a boatload of RAM, one of the new 3 Ghz processors and your U320 Raid cards you would probably be close to the Precision, maybe not quite as stable, and you might need a better powersupply. And you would probably save some money Dell wants $4500 for 4 gigs of DDR SDRAM, I'm sure you could find that on the after market for about half that price once it gets added to the various memory companies' pages. The drives were more competitive, and I don't know what Xeons go for so I'll assume that it is pretty close. I realize that the power supply and motherboard require some special features, but how different, in terms of extra work for Intel and Microsoft are Xeons and Windows Professional? By the way, a fully tricked out Precision with the new Chipset and all the goodies gets exceeds $20,000.
Not PC, Workstation, thse still have SCSI, and other cool toys. I know there isn't much diference between a Dell Precision and a nice Dell Dimension, but there was until a few years ago. There were many low cost OSes around, and IBM really gave away the farm, but it was MS that happened to be at the right place at the right time. And their OS was useable enough for both the general userbase and programmers to pickup one of those newfangled PCs and find that they were worth something. Moore's law should have worked for the other companies as well.
The point of my story was that both Microsoft and Intel have some market power over their parts of the PC, and both extended thier market power into the workstation market. However, even though the two companies continued to exert monopoly rents from their Workstation customers, those customers were better off then they had been under the previous more competitive market place.
A competitive market does not a happy economist make. Imagine a world in which there never was a Microsoft. However, in this imagnination, I place a caveat, there was no Microsoft, because there was no PC. While there is a competitive market for each of the many standards of computers, none has more than a few percentage points of market share, and since they all must cover their very high research and development costs with very few unit sales each computer costs, several thousand dollars, and they don't work together very well. Where are consumers better off in that world with no monopolist, or in ours where their is one? Yes, monopolists do create efficiency losses, but they can improve utility for consumers.
By the way, the Workstation market, is pretty similar to the no Microsoft world I described. About 10 years ago, the typical workstation cost $20,000. About 5 years ago, the first PC based workstations were introduced. Now the average workstation costs less than $7,000, both Unix systems and Windows based workstations have fallen in price since the introduction, and Microsoft is collecting monopoly rents on those copies of Windows that go in the workstations. I doubt most workstaion buyers would prefer the pre monopolist market to the market of today.
I found that I have more free time once I graduated, than I did in college. Not that I did much homework in college, at least after I left engineering, but I usually had around 25 ish hours of classes and a few labs, but they were usually scattered around my schedule, and including transit times, and a 10-15 hr per week part time job, I was busy from 8-5. After this I usually spent around 10 hours a week working on projects, and in group meetings, which were generally unproductive on the Dilbert managment scale. Now, I am busy from 8-5, but all other times are my own. I rarely have to bring work home, and I get comp time if a meeting goes late or something.
Also the cool temps can hurt your hard drive. If you ever get one delivered, and it sits out side, let it warm up to room temp before you fire it up.
I am using windows 2000 currently, and have been a windows user for almost all of my computing experience. I keep using it for several reasons, but primarily because MS gave me the licensed disk, a rep came to our campus and passed them out to students, the meetings were only advertized in the CS wing of the campus, but they never asked about majors. So this removed one of the major advantages of Linux over windows, cost. Win2k is more than stable enough for my needs, and I haven't had any major security problems yet, although I'm certainly not advertizing my IP just in case.
I have run Linux in the past, even on my main computer, and while it was an excellent OS, star office 5.2 for linux was much slower than the windows version, it was un useable on my P133, which was my only PC at the time. I needed an office suite, of at least that capability, si I had to switch back. I realize that Open office and SO 6 are probably much better now but really like Win2k.
I like it because I play the occasional game, and most of them seem to run much better on Windows, if on anything else. It also comes in handy at work, where we use Windows, and I end up being the quick problem guy, our tech is usually busy, and I'm next door, so my officemates, usually pop in to get some help. I do run Linux on my second PC, but I don't boot it as often as the Windows one.
In the future, I am thinking that my next PC will either be an old workstation, hopefully an Alpha (21264 if I can find one) or a Mac, MacOS just looks nice, although HP's Power stuff gets pretty cheap on the used market too. If those hammer's, or Opeterons, or what ever are cheap enough I might build something based on that instead. If I run an old workstation, I will probably have to run the UNIX flavor that their supposed to, or maybe BSD, I don't know about Linux on the PA stuff, but Linux on the alpha's works pretty well. A Mac would run OS X, of course, and the hammers would probably get my Win2k again, maybe linux.
If I do any server level stuff, I am thinking about a client server level system in my next place. Silent, flash or similar clients in strategic places with a main server somewhere, and possibly one real PC in a den or something, the server will probably run Linux.
Those are just my current leanings, and they could change tomorrow with new information.
2 years ago in Redmond...
.Net enterprise services.
"Hey Bill, I think I finally understand your plan for this console thingy."
1)Create gaiming platform.
2)Accept losses while platform becomes dominant.
3)Losses, however they remain smaller than our interest.
4)Slowly roll out new productivity services under a subscription.
5)Profit, from subscription services to Office, the internet, and a small cut of every online sale. Also, anyone who wants to interact with our millions console access customers will have to purchase
"Very good Steve" [pat] [pat].
"Thanks Bill, can I go dance for the developers again?" "Pleeease?"
"All right, Steve, you have been a good figurehead for some time."
Your age, wasn't that only about three years ago? I bet your 300a will last another 4 years, at which time it won't be too slow, but your caps will all leak and your system will explode. ;-)
You know some case maker should add a turbo button, just so I can push it and feel better when im doing something CPU intensive. It would be extra cool, if it oc'ed the processor when you pushed it.
They blocked the satalite mergers, because they would not have any competitors in most rural areas. Going from two competitors to one, usualy has pretty drastic effects on the competitive landscape. While those in the cities could switch to cable if the combined company raised prices, many rural dwellers could not. The cable companies are usually monopolies because they have a local right granted by a city to be the only cable company. These were designed to get the cable built, otherwise very densly populated areas, several hundered homes per mile, would have many cable companies serving them and everyone else would have none.
Because the cable companies don't really compete with each other exept in population dense areas, where the sat, companies also both compete, this was viewed as adding little to the compined company's market power. A city that was served by one of the companies will still be served by one of the companies. The cable companies are also currently classified as competitors to the local phone monopolies, when you add all these competitors together, the FCC decided that this would not reduce competition much.
Finally, the abrasivness of the EchoStar CEO probably did more than anything else to turn regulators off towards the merger. He is pretty brash, and well you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
It happened, but I think it was before the eighties, I remember buying them in the early eighties. Rental was a PITA, because it was really expensive. This was one of the ways AT&T collected their monopoly rents. Where do you think all the money came from to throw at things like Bell Labs, its obvious that Lucent never made any money once the monopoly teat was taken away. Western Electric was the AT&T company that made the phones you had to rent. I believe that you were allowed to own a phone, but it wasn't allowed ot interfere with the network, and ma' bell was pretty slow to approve any phones that wouldn't interfere with the network.
They did similar things to the long distance companies, preventing them from accessing their local networks without costly equipment, but that is what brought about the lawsuit that ended with the breakup agreement. Of course those were the days, when long distance calls were more of a luxury. Its ironic that AT&T more or less got to decide how to split up the company, but still gave away all the powerful parts of the monopoly. They kept the then profitable long distance business, Bell Labs, and NCR. Only after it became appearant that the local loops were where the monopoly power was, did AT&T start buying cable companies for rich valuations, hoping to create a local network to compete with the companies they gave away in the settlement.