I think the average/.er might give Mikey a run for his money (which isn't saying much given the post quality around here including me). Eisner fixed a very broken company but hasn't had any good ideas since the mid 90s. Since then he has insulated himself with a management friendly board, done little to significantly improve the business, and overpaid himself with cash, benefits, and stock. Roy tried to oust him and found out just how well Eisner has protected himself. Disney would be an excellent hostile takeover candidate if you had a ton of perserverance. Here's the biggest problem with Disney animations, they are all too political. After Lion King they started getting very PC, regarless of your opinions of the belief's espoused, that really does not need to be in a kids movie. Also it pissed off the southern baptists and other conservative organizations which then began boycotting and denouncing Disney, loudly enough to cut spending in a group that covers lots of families.
You probably wouldn't have seen Toy Story if it hadn't been for Disney. Disney provided two things, distribution through their agreements with theaters, and marketing through their partnerships with fast food resturants etc. Pixar created fresh movies using new technology at the time. I think some of the inital funding might have been provided by Disney. They took the risk that Pixar's movies would flop, at least the first few.
As it turned out, they were all hits and Disney made out like bandits, now that Pixar is an established hit maker, they felt that they diserved more of the cut, and Disney did not agree with them. So the contract fell through. I'm still trying to decide whether Dreamworks, Fox, or WB will be more generous, in their offer. Note that Disney does get one or two more movies (I think one might be a sequal) over the next two years.
You don't suppose they might call it Wintel for a reason. Perhaps we need a Limd partnership or something. Its funny because the 64 bit version of Windows was basically a quid pro quo for Sanders' testimony at one of the anti-trust trials that a single OS had been very benefical to the PC market.
Also, HP has pretty much scrapped processor development in their PA line and their Alpha line. So they are dependant on Itanium. However, Itanium will probably never become the purvasive enterprise architecture it was originally lauded to be, adopted by other manufacturers. Outside of HP the only other big supporter is SGI. IBM and Dell are only dabbling at this point.
That's funny I just fired up a friend's old 16MHz 286, it was like a walk down memory lane, WordPerfect, Quattro, Mavis becon, unfortunatly someone deleted the files out of the Oregon Trail Directory.
Also, expensive workstations were running at least 32 bits in those days How old are Apollos or Sparc 4s and 5s? Not quite up to the fluid dynamics level, I recall seing some killer visualizations on the SGIs in the early 1990s.
If you release anytime between late october and the week before Christmas that's generally considered to be a Christmas release. The industry generates well over half their sales during those three months. The April May June months in comparison suck.
NT's are the typical "geeks" I'm an INTJ. It's their way of classifying people that broadly splits people into four groups:
Artisans, who like action and activity, craftspeopel, artists, and lives of the party usually fall under the SP group.
Guardians these are typically the politicians lawyers managers they love order. Those people who worked their tails of for straight A's were likely guardians.
These two groups each make up 30-40% of the population, and typical couples are made up of one of each.
NFs are the Intuitives, they care an aweful lot about the feelings that someone undergoes through their day.
NTs we're the Rationals, we love to think, don't usually care about appearance, and are generally all the stereotypical geeks things are apt descriptors of rationals. If you loved math and science and took all your toys apart to see how they worked and then generally didn't care for them you are likely a rational. NTs seem to be highly over-represented on the internet, likely because were pretty rare, geographically diverse, and don't mind the tradoffs that come from electronic communication.
There is an excellent book about MBTI called Please Understand Me and and an updated version of it called Please Understand Me II.
Most of the industry measures generations in bits, I've heard this is more like 5th generation. (Atari, etc, then using Nintendo NES, SNES, N64, NGC) with very broad groupings of systems around those timeframes.
It's likely that Sony and MS will cut the price of bother their leading generation consoles to something in the $99-$129 range between E3 and Labor Day. If the price is $129 speculation will be rampent about a cut to $99 around Thanksgiving. The new buzz is in response to several game makers who are expecting some variant of these price cuts this year. It's pretty common for prices to fall as you move further up the adoption curve, each generation has cuts, it only becomes a problem if you need to generate a signficant profit from hardware, now, or if you continue to have falling sales after the hardware price cut. I think Sega was running into both problems and got a pretty sweet offer to move their internally developed titles to the X-Box.
I think that the expense comes not so much from the connector, but from a better screen. From what I've seen you cant get DVI on the low end stuff, but it is a common feature on more expensive screens. Would assume that since most screens that feature DVI connections continue to support analog connections that there is some additional cost. I've also never seen a motherboard with onboard video that supported DVI, although those might exist, and outside of the build it yourself world most people buying a computer these days are getting a cheap onboard video based system. Since flat panel makers don't want to cut out a large part of their potential market, which is very price sensitive and quality insensitive. Cheap LCD screens won't support DVI until onboard video does in signficant numbers.
They probably do not understand the benefits to switching, and DVI is only offered on higher end monitors. The average buyer differentiates LCD screens largely on size and is not interested in a 15" monitor that costs $50 less than this 17" one right next to it.
I think you're gonna lose this one, it's like the whole "Manufactured diamonds are even more flawless than the natural ones, honey." arguement the two sexes generally have quite different views on the subject. I'd love to have this, it's just an technological enhancment of the bespoke process which has been the method traditionally used to buy clothing for men. There isn't as much variety for our main work clothing (suits), ie vents, collar style, stripes or solid, pleats or not, they are all basically the same. You do get to pick the basic style and fabrics, which make some difference, but not a ton. Women have a dizzying array of styles, fabrics, and other things to choose, and they might have a significant difference of opinion about two very similar styles.
It's still isn't in parity, but I would think that we would probably host DNS servers in propotion relative economies or relative numbers of accessors. I think in both cases the US accounts for about 1/3 of global totals. I would assume that it will stay in parity with those figures for a reasonable period of time. Remember that the internet has only been a mainstream phonomeon for about a decade, so the fact that we developed it is probably a lot of the imbalance. I don't think that you will see India or China hosting 40% of DNS servers in our lifetimes.
It's the same guy who bought a Sun system on ebay and has been writing columns on shiny new (to him anyway) system. The specs from the purchase article:
The system I'm using is a second generation of the Ultra 5, released in late 1998. Here are the specs:
System: Sun Ultra 5
Processor: UltraSPARC IIi 333 MHz, 2MB cache
Memory: 256 MB
HD: Seagate Medalist 7200 RPM IDE Pro 9140 8.4 GB
IDE Controller: Built-in UDMA2, 33 MB/s max
CD-ROM: 32x IDE
Video Controller: Sun PGX24 (ATI Mach64), 4 MB VRAM
Network: Built-in 10/100 NIC (hme, "Happy Meal" interface)
My knowledge of sun processors is a little lacking in the UltraSPARC II range, so I'll leave it to you to evaluate this one, My only exposure is the dead server CPU module for a paperweight. It and a foxtrot on the corkborad are my own version of the geek purity test.
That is their profits made in the EU, they could fine them any amount they wished, the alternative is being shut out of the market. It would be tough to collect a fine imposed on a company in a sovereign nation.
It's actually great, (our economic miracle was figuring this out and trading promises in the form of pieces of paper, stock, currency, and debt, for real goods) until you have to send real goods out to pay back the debt. Or default, but then people tend not to trust you for a long, long time. By building up credibility over the last 300 years, we get a really good deal on our promises.
We still have not needed to pay the piper, but the time is coming, and that is going to make the last 5 years look really good. All those kooky gold bugs will finally be right. Expect a rapid and nasty devaluation of the dollar, and any assets that depend on the dollar's value like you retirement account and home. On the plus side all those companies that make money importing cheap crap from other countries, will be out of business.
Boat building is a special case, we had a thriving industry here until some politicians got together and decided that too many rich people were spending excessive wealth on boats and slapped a huge tax on their manufacture. That gave the foreign built bats a major cost advantage and killed the industry here. Oh and hand made watches (the $5,000 and up kind) are still generally made by highly skilled people in the first world, and the industry picked up enough that a new company just entered the business, not that you can start in the business tomorrow. Construction pays a bit better than $12/hour too in part because the workers can start their own business with only a little extra effort (for the license and paperwork).
I know in China they are slowly beginning to undertake some riskier manufacturing projects, (self branded products rather than ODM stuff) sort of like Samsung's transformation over the past few years, I think they have been ODMing things for about a decade or two. I also believe that a ton of the people leading the Indian companies were educated and probably got experience here, and likely picked up some of that entreprenurial culture of risk taking and innovation. No the average call taker or code monkey probably does not have it yet, just like the ones here, but there is a growing group that does. I think Wipro was setting up some design and sales integration shops here, so it's happing but slower than the migration of jobs.
Finally, I'd like to point out that this is very much a bubble, just like old guard comapnies were running scared about their internet strategy, 5 or 6 years ago, as the young turks were taking over the world. It will build to a more feverish pitch and then pop. After that rational levels of investment will take place. Now would be the ideal time to begin preparations for the inevitable recovery post Indian bubble and corresponding huge, but slower development of India.
In the near term we should put our heads together and think of things that this new large middle class in India will need and begin developing production for it. Cars, computers, electronics, there have to be tons of things that they won't have the capability to produce for several years after demand emerges (or in some cases ever) that will be huge businesses. Look at luxury goods in Japan, the develpment of that region has helped high end companies tremendously. Scotch, Swiss watches, Louis Vutton, and many other firms all do very well in Japan (even in the 90s they did pretty well) if you figure out a product like that to sell in India you will likely do well. The trick is finding something that takes a long time to replicate, sure someone in Japan could produce hand made watches or single malt whiskey, but it is not quite the same.
Some quick ideas are cars, American made computer components, designer goods. You don't have to go into production of these items, but buy stock in companies that do, or go to work for companies that make them.
The X Box is likely to be released around the same timeframe, (in time for Christmas 05 if they are lucky otherwise early O6). Nintendo is planning to have something definitely in the 2005 timeframe. You'll know they are close when current generation hardware prices fall to $99, figure about a year or so at that point.
I've heard that in order to meet graphics chips 6 months cycle (this was back in the 2000-2001 timeframe) times N'Vidia used to have three or four hardware teams each working on new chip design.
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Wasn't Ice Age a Disney movie? I really enjoyed Anistasia, but I had never heard the story before the film.
I think the average /.er might give Mikey a run for his money (which isn't saying much given the post quality around here including me). Eisner fixed a very broken company but hasn't had any good ideas since the mid 90s. Since then he has insulated himself with a management friendly board, done little to significantly improve the business, and overpaid himself with cash, benefits, and stock. Roy tried to oust him and found out just how well Eisner has protected himself. Disney would be an excellent hostile takeover candidate if you had a ton of perserverance. Here's the biggest problem with Disney animations, they are all too political. After Lion King they started getting very PC, regarless of your opinions of the belief's espoused, that really does not need to be in a kids movie. Also it pissed off the southern baptists and other conservative organizations which then began boycotting and denouncing Disney, loudly enough to cut spending in a group that covers lots of families.
You probably wouldn't have seen Toy Story if it hadn't been for Disney. Disney provided two things, distribution through their agreements with theaters, and marketing through their partnerships with fast food resturants etc. Pixar created fresh movies using new technology at the time. I think some of the inital funding might have been provided by Disney. They took the risk that Pixar's movies would flop, at least the first few.
As it turned out, they were all hits and Disney made out like bandits, now that Pixar is an established hit maker, they felt that they diserved more of the cut, and Disney did not agree with them. So the contract fell through. I'm still trying to decide whether Dreamworks, Fox, or WB will be more generous, in their offer. Note that Disney does get one or two more movies (I think one might be a sequal) over the next two years.
You don't suppose they might call it Wintel for a reason. Perhaps we need a Limd partnership or something. Its funny because the 64 bit version of Windows was basically a quid pro quo for Sanders' testimony at one of the anti-trust trials that a single OS had been very benefical to the PC market.
Also, HP has pretty much scrapped processor development in their PA line and their Alpha line. So they are dependant on Itanium. However, Itanium will probably never become the purvasive enterprise architecture it was originally lauded to be, adopted by other manufacturers. Outside of HP the only other big supporter is SGI. IBM and Dell are only dabbling at this point.
That's funny I just fired up a friend's old 16MHz 286, it was like a walk down memory lane, WordPerfect, Quattro, Mavis becon, unfortunatly someone deleted the files out of the Oregon Trail Directory. Also, expensive workstations were running at least 32 bits in those days How old are Apollos or Sparc 4s and 5s? Not quite up to the fluid dynamics level, I recall seing some killer visualizations on the SGIs in the early 1990s.
If you release anytime between late october and the week before Christmas that's generally considered to be a Christmas release. The industry generates well over half their sales during those three months. The April May June months in comparison suck.
I was thinking that he had the reforged sword king's sword when they met the riders of Rohan.
NT's are the typical "geeks" I'm an INTJ. It's their way of classifying people that broadly splits people into four groups:
Artisans, who like action and activity, craftspeopel, artists, and lives of the party usually fall under the SP group. Guardians these are typically the politicians lawyers managers they love order. Those people who worked their tails of for straight A's were likely guardians. These two groups each make up 30-40% of the population, and typical couples are made up of one of each. NFs are the Intuitives, they care an aweful lot about the feelings that someone undergoes through their day. NTs we're the Rationals, we love to think, don't usually care about appearance, and are generally all the stereotypical geeks things are apt descriptors of rationals. If you loved math and science and took all your toys apart to see how they worked and then generally didn't care for them you are likely a rational. NTs seem to be highly over-represented on the internet, likely because were pretty rare, geographically diverse, and don't mind the tradoffs that come from electronic communication. There is an excellent book about MBTI called Please Understand Me and and an updated version of it called Please Understand Me II.
Most of the industry measures generations in bits, I've heard this is more like 5th generation. (Atari, etc, then using Nintendo NES, SNES, N64, NGC) with very broad groupings of systems around those timeframes.
It's likely that Sony and MS will cut the price of bother their leading generation consoles to something in the $99-$129 range between E3 and Labor Day. If the price is $129 speculation will be rampent about a cut to $99 around Thanksgiving. The new buzz is in response to several game makers who are expecting some variant of these price cuts this year. It's pretty common for prices to fall as you move further up the adoption curve, each generation has cuts, it only becomes a problem if you need to generate a signficant profit from hardware, now, or if you continue to have falling sales after the hardware price cut. I think Sega was running into both problems and got a pretty sweet offer to move their internally developed titles to the X-Box.
I think that the expense comes not so much from the connector, but from a better screen. From what I've seen you cant get DVI on the low end stuff, but it is a common feature on more expensive screens. Would assume that since most screens that feature DVI connections continue to support analog connections that there is some additional cost. I've also never seen a motherboard with onboard video that supported DVI, although those might exist, and outside of the build it yourself world most people buying a computer these days are getting a cheap onboard video based system. Since flat panel makers don't want to cut out a large part of their potential market, which is very price sensitive and quality insensitive. Cheap LCD screens won't support DVI until onboard video does in signficant numbers.
They probably do not understand the benefits to switching, and DVI is only offered on higher end monitors. The average buyer differentiates LCD screens largely on size and is not interested in a 15" monitor that costs $50 less than this 17" one right next to it.
I think you're gonna lose this one, it's like the whole "Manufactured diamonds are even more flawless than the natural ones, honey." arguement the two sexes generally have quite different views on the subject. I'd love to have this, it's just an technological enhancment of the bespoke process which has been the method traditionally used to buy clothing for men. There isn't as much variety for our main work clothing (suits), ie vents, collar style, stripes or solid, pleats or not, they are all basically the same. You do get to pick the basic style and fabrics, which make some difference, but not a ton. Women have a dizzying array of styles, fabrics, and other things to choose, and they might have a significant difference of opinion about two very similar styles.
It's still isn't in parity, but I would think that we would probably host DNS servers in propotion relative economies or relative numbers of accessors. I think in both cases the US accounts for about 1/3 of global totals. I would assume that it will stay in parity with those figures for a reasonable period of time. Remember that the internet has only been a mainstream phonomeon for about a decade, so the fact that we developed it is probably a lot of the imbalance. I don't think that you will see India or China hosting 40% of DNS servers in our lifetimes.
You know this is a geek website when someone asks a [hypothetical] question and has three answers within ten minutes.
It's the same guy who bought a Sun system on ebay and has been writing columns on shiny new (to him anyway) system. The specs from the purchase article:
The system I'm using is a second generation of the Ultra 5, released in late 1998. Here are the specs:
System: Sun Ultra 5
Processor: UltraSPARC IIi 333 MHz, 2MB cache
Memory: 256 MB
HD: Seagate Medalist 7200 RPM IDE Pro 9140 8.4 GB
IDE Controller: Built-in UDMA2, 33 MB/s max
CD-ROM: 32x IDE
Video Controller: Sun PGX24 (ATI Mach64), 4 MB VRAM
Network: Built-in 10/100 NIC (hme, "Happy Meal" interface)
My knowledge of sun processors is a little lacking in the UltraSPARC II range, so I'll leave it to you to evaluate this one, My only exposure is the dead server CPU module for a paperweight. It and a foxtrot on the corkborad are my own version of the geek purity test.
I have seen a varient of that quote attributed to Einstein regarding relativity.
That is their profits made in the EU, they could fine them any amount they wished, the alternative is being shut out of the market. It would be tough to collect a fine imposed on a company in a sovereign nation.
It's actually great, (our economic miracle was figuring this out and trading promises in the form of pieces of paper, stock, currency, and debt, for real goods) until you have to send real goods out to pay back the debt. Or default, but then people tend not to trust you for a long, long time. By building up credibility over the last 300 years, we get a really good deal on our promises.
We still have not needed to pay the piper, but the time is coming, and that is going to make the last 5 years look really good. All those kooky gold bugs will finally be right. Expect a rapid and nasty devaluation of the dollar, and any assets that depend on the dollar's value like you retirement account and home. On the plus side all those companies that make money importing cheap crap from other countries, will be out of business.
Boat building is a special case, we had a thriving industry here until some politicians got together and decided that too many rich people were spending excessive wealth on boats and slapped a huge tax on their manufacture. That gave the foreign built bats a major cost advantage and killed the industry here. Oh and hand made watches (the $5,000 and up kind) are still generally made by highly skilled people in the first world, and the industry picked up enough that a new company just entered the business, not that you can start in the business tomorrow. Construction pays a bit better than $12/hour too in part because the workers can start their own business with only a little extra effort (for the license and paperwork).
I know in China they are slowly beginning to undertake some riskier manufacturing projects, (self branded products rather than ODM stuff) sort of like Samsung's transformation over the past few years, I think they have been ODMing things for about a decade or two. I also believe that a ton of the people leading the Indian companies were educated and probably got experience here, and likely picked up some of that entreprenurial culture of risk taking and innovation. No the average call taker or code monkey probably does not have it yet, just like the ones here, but there is a growing group that does. I think Wipro was setting up some design and sales integration shops here, so it's happing but slower than the migration of jobs.
Finally, I'd like to point out that this is very much a bubble, just like old guard comapnies were running scared about their internet strategy, 5 or 6 years ago, as the young turks were taking over the world. It will build to a more feverish pitch and then pop. After that rational levels of investment will take place. Now would be the ideal time to begin preparations for the inevitable recovery post Indian bubble and corresponding huge, but slower development of India.
In the near term we should put our heads together and think of things that this new large middle class in India will need and begin developing production for it. Cars, computers, electronics, there have to be tons of things that they won't have the capability to produce for several years after demand emerges (or in some cases ever) that will be huge businesses. Look at luxury goods in Japan, the develpment of that region has helped high end companies tremendously. Scotch, Swiss watches, Louis Vutton, and many other firms all do very well in Japan (even in the 90s they did pretty well) if you figure out a product like that to sell in India you will likely do well. The trick is finding something that takes a long time to replicate, sure someone in Japan could produce hand made watches or single malt whiskey, but it is not quite the same.
Some quick ideas are cars, American made computer components, designer goods. You don't have to go into production of these items, but buy stock in companies that do, or go to work for companies that make them.
The X Box is likely to be released around the same timeframe, (in time for Christmas 05 if they are lucky otherwise early O6). Nintendo is planning to have something definitely in the 2005 timeframe. You'll know they are close when current generation hardware prices fall to $99, figure about a year or so at that point.
I've heard that in order to meet graphics chips 6 months cycle (this was back in the 2000-2001 timeframe) times N'Vidia used to have three or four hardware teams each working on new chip design.