Duh! don't we have several games/movies about the subject of corperate interest in space real estate? If you can get there who can really stop you? To a certian extent the "law of the jungle" applies to the moon.. if you can get there to claim it... and KEEP it... it's pretty much yours...
The whole point of the article is that while Dell makes more money, Apple get's more profit per dollar they spend... from a financial point of view Wall Street would rather have 3 or 4 apples than one Dell barely squeeking by.
Apple makes WAY higher profits per PC sold than Dell does.. Dell only hits 3-4% over their cost... they rely on upgrades for the profit. Apple makes up to 20% per PC after expenses... They can support A LOT of R&D on that extra.
But "expensive" is in the eye of the latest ads.. Apple doesn't really have a $299 striped down POS that will just barely work like Dell does. You are correct, by the time you bring that "cheaper" dell upto decent specs that apple sells standard. But "suits" go by the numbers and spring for the cheaper one every time. Dell counts on we IT people for profits because we "fix" their drastically under spec'd hardware and it's "our" fault those Dells aren't $299 like the ad says.
you're absolutely correct!!! Nobody is forced into the US way of running the internet. Each country could make it's own DNS server run it's own way. There would be added complexity between countries.. you'd need some kind of "country code" but it's no more complicated than what we do now with phone numbers.
What the whole "UN internet" thing is really about is having some "world" body to police what people do on line... that SHOULD scare you because 4-out-of-5 seats at the UN are held by petty dictators.. and the "democracies" are lobbied heavily by corperations. This is ALL about France and Germany wanting to punish me in Michigan for publishing something about Nazis... or China getting tired of people inside hacking their way around the "great red firewall".
The internet only grew this much because of the US being so set on free speech for everybody.. as soon as you start adding rules and restrictions on what people can say [and that IS the purpose of international control] then you start a race to the bottom where the only content allowed is corperate sponsored and government approved!!
It's all about how you view the use of Ip addresses to start with. The "old guys" have this idea of everything with it's own IP address pie in the sky type thing. Unfortunately, they hoarded huge chunks of numbers up front making it very difficult for the rest of us to implement such grand schemes. The flip side is who wants every IP in your office to be routable? That's utterly stupid if all those PCs were windows. Nats and Firewalls in corperate/small home nework are the only thing holding back the virus/spyware/worm situation from being worse!! having set up corperate networks, it's a NICE thing to assign non-routable IPs to your office setup... it ensures your firewall can't be easily breached by something you forgot. Nat'ing is here to stay... we don't WANT people poking behind our firewalls... we don't want people to know about any internal IP other than the public address of our web page. Think of it like PBX in the phone world.. who want's their internal extention in the phone book for the world???
But with HDTV sets the broadcasters with antennas have all sorts of power now. It's too bad the local stations have never got on the TiVo thing because with HD they have all the cards... program guide + data stream, HD quality, up to 4 channels to air on.. With a very simple hack [think dual tuner myth-TV box] the stations could do this on their own right now... other than the obstruction problem, broadcast has the upper hand in quality and features right now.. if they would only start implememting them. They could simulcast 3 things at once so you never had to miss a "prime time show" and keep the advertizing money by showing the same commercials... or different ones per channel.. it just takes a little more work.
The affiliates desperately need to stick to the schedules better... I don't know how many good shows get canceled by poor scheduling rather than being a bad show. Case in point, firefly.. it jumpped around so much on my local channel I almost never got to see it... and it was a hard story to follow. Once it was on Sci-fi every friday, I got to see enough of it to really like it. Enterprise followed the same fate. they started showing it several times a week at different times of day... it was easy to catch on a lazy sunday afternoon if you were busy friday night. Then somebody got greedy and tried moving it's day and taking away the extra showings... I lost half a season because I wasn't glued to my TV on their schedule!
But Disney as a network has a lot of good content that fits the download model... Many of the disney network shows are plenty worth downloading a few at a time for the kids... it's the kind of stuff perfect for everyone to watch on road trips. The Disney network shows fit the "minivan" crowd of episodes on the go perfectly. Disney has just the kind of huge catalog of short stuff that's in demand, but too hard to market on DVDs.. [Think orginal mickey mouse, shorts, house of mouse, fantasia shorts, etc...]
The catch to "non-iTMS" stores is that they're pretty much ALL microsoft fronts!! Apple should really consider opening up something to Real... just to throw a bone out there to all the anti-apple people. Apple needs to start the enemy-of-my-enemy type thinking about the whole media thing... Bill Gates has an awsome gnack for getting along with "suits" at these big media companies. Apple needs to push the non-windows front a little harder. then the market will be big enough that one "store" can't dominate the landscape. Like in the brick-and-mortar world, the idea is to get enough different things out there it's stupid for anybody to try to sell their wares at only one store.
Apple doesn't have a monololy on anything except iPods. That's the difference. Remember, all that music store "competition" out there is only 2 players... Microsoft and by a long shot Real. All the other stores, napster, musicmatch, dell, walmart, yahoo, etc.. are all part of the Microsoft cabal. If you look at microsoft's intentions for x360, you'd see they're just setting up the "market" so they can gobble it up at will and shut everyone out.
The difference is that Apple has one really big store... kinda like Walmart. How silly would it be if companies would refuse to sell their CDs at brick and mortar Walmart just because they were "bigger". Sure companies may favor Walmart over BestBuy or Barnes and Nobel, but record companies don't wholesale refuse to sell to any other chain like that. Microsoft on the other hand is trying to keep the market "selectively split" so that so the only thing you have to glue your stuff together is Microsoft DRM.. Microsoft is buy far worse because they're using their monopoly on the desktop to force all the publishers to be "sharecropping" paying a toll to Microsoft for everything you download.
I don't get the rabid anti-itunes rants.. there's no middle ground... choose Apple or Microsoft, everybody else is bit players.. remember, HD-DVD is the coupe-de-grace when MS will embed their DRM support in everything consumer!
Actually, a Hazmat class should be taught in public schools... you ARE responsible to follow environmental laws, so the schools should teach you what to do with that jar of mercury, or 5 gallons of lead paint in grandma's basement...
The Poster was arguing that "real" auctioneers should have to take [and pass] "Ebay" classes if the Ebay people have to learn "talking really fast". Grandpa may have been an auctioneer for 50 years selling antiques, but that doesn't qualify him to ebay any more than your typical ebay-er to hawk fine art.
> It will also provide a new source of tax revenue, which is the main reason the gov't wants it.
Close, but not quite.
But that's the real ticket.. if you have to be a "licensed" auctioneer, then you have to follow what ever rules the state puts on auctioneers... most states have sales tax, accounting, stolen property, etc. rules that you have to prove you follow... so yes, this is exactly about taxes!
If I were them, the plan's wouldn't be to release ANOTHER competing office suite, but to work within what's already out there. Once OpenDocument takes off, you'll be able to create tiny tools that work with the standard file format... something like a huge suite won't have to exist anymore... Look what Apple's been doing with Pages... It's a whole new way of using documents.. that makes it much easier for those who just want a pretty sheet of paper. When opendocument takes off, you'll be able to use all that wonderful Googlieness without a 100 meg program open to just type a grocery list.
That would be because you can't get the expansions off the shelf here in the USA. you can order it over that new fangled intar-web but what a hassle.
That said, I really like the game, but without the expansions, updating to newer patches breaks stuff... It's a neat game though. It's also a lot like Once Upon A Knight [KnightShift for everybody else] It's closer to how my kids play warcraft 3 but the community [mods, maps, etc] is a bit hard to find much of unless you speak good German.
My point wasn't that they didn't do it, but that it wasn't legally admissible in courts. If they broke into some guys house thinking he was a terrorist, but only found bags of pot the CIA couldn't do anything about it... because they weren't "legally" supposed to be there. Legally, they couldn't even "leak" the info to other departments because the CIA broke the law... and that would poison any criminal investigation by the FBI or locals.
The "patriot" act was around for at least 4 years before 9-11 because the drug enforcement people got tired of not being able to use that wonderful CIA installed intel base. The CIA knows who's smuggling what around the bays.. and can use illegal, unconstitutional means to make sure they're not plotting attacks.. That of course means their agents have first hand knowladge of "where the boddies are burried" for many crime bosses... but they can't tell because the info was obtained illegally... "Patriot" was all about a giant grab for that information so more "normal" crimes could be enforced from the CIA's extreme measures to get intel.
you do realize that vista's shiny new graphics will undoubtably require full support for DX 10, right. That $500 7800 you just bought will run like a dog in Vista because it won't support the "new" formats for the desktop. On top of that video game players will still have to upgrade because the DX 10 supporting cards shipped will be ATi 9200/ nvidia 5500 class chips with no real guts other than the few vista specific additions.
The real bonus for Linux is to point this out to people. The Beta won't run in anything except 4-bit color on stock Dells... Vista will be a "line in the sand" so pretty much nobody will be able to upgrade easily... this is the fact to start pushing.. all those 800-1.5 machines that are perfectly good will be obsoleted just because of an OS change... but this Linux here will run out of the box.
The killer Linux enterprise app will be to build either an SMS style Ubuntu distro that can be fully remotely managed... or to build a Knoppix style distro that lets you customize for your companies lan... just boot the live CD and go!!! The big distros [Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake] all miss this.. the OS is not the issue, but configuration, management, updates, etc. of 500+ machines is the issue.. move email users faster, set up new stations faster.... that's where the REAL fight for MS is at.. most MCSE's don't even know how to do the parts of that windows can do NOW!!!
Bill G wants windows to be the $10 temp worker.. you just gotta pay him when you need one. Linux is like the $10+ benifits worker... you gotta put more effort into it, but it gives more back too!
That would be the software assurance that they sold everybody 4 years ago taht RAN OUT before you got any substantial OS savings? Microsoft tends to forget most people don't pay JUST for windows... normally they order Dells and that's just part of the cost. Trouble is we jut went thru a "silver age" of computing... 1GHz was 4 years ago? depending on the user's needs even that's overkill. MS is trying to use the Upgrade card but it's just not worth it. The only way SA was ever worth it was if you had to re-buy retail full licenses... they can make the record keeping a PITA, but it was about a 2/3-year split and if you were a company constantly cycleing thru dells every 3 years SA jsut wasn't worth it. In the Vista case, it's even LESS worth it than other windows versions because it DEFINATELY won't run on all the cheap Dells bought just this month!!! Signing for a whole company worth at this point isn't worth it.
But the suits love Billy G. he's microsoft's mealticket. As long as he can keep MS software as the ONLY way to bank, get govt docs, communicate with large corporations, and shut everybody else out, he'll have a steady sorce of income. MS could afford to GIVE the govt their products because if it's required to do business they can charge the middle men anything they want for it!!!
the whole point of having the FBI & CIA very seperate was to put up a "chineese wall" of sorts between agencies with little local power and agencies with great local power. The original idea being that the CIA could do whatever they wanted to spy on people, in the name of security, but generally their intel was banned from normal courts. Of course after 911 everybody was all "they should have known" but the people in the know just want a free information grab... that's what it's always been about.
A lot of the problem with law enforcement is like that ocnversation in SW2 when Amidila is describing democracy and the constant throws of neigotion when Anakin steps in and says somebody "wise" should "make" the people get along... Much of our US law enforcement is of the same mentality. they're good people, but they aren't really taught to keep religion, morality, and law seperate in their minds... They tend to view law as religion... which causes trouble when you need to make changes!
I love my Michigan ballots! In my county we use "connect the bars" type ballots. You get a simple sheet of paper with the issues on it and connect-the-bars to flag your vote. You have to make a half-inch black line to connect a larger line. To count the votes they are scanned in to an electronic counter/lockbox. All the election officals have to do is read off the numbers to the state office... nice and simple. Then the lock boxes are sequestered for several months until the election is confirmed then the ballots destroyed by the state election commission. As far as paper trail, each ballot has a tear-off serial number that they keep when they give you the ballot along with your voter proof. If an issue was to come up, they could get all the serial numbers back to compare against the cards for valididy. Sure it's not 100%, but you gotta put some trust somewhere.
It's about as perfect as you can get. It's simple for even elderly to understand. It's counted electronically to speed things up. The orginal copy with the marks are secured until the results are final. And the best of all, you still have paper copies should you need to hand recount.
The main thing I see need for in election reform is more consistancy, and more openness to alternate-shift workers. The current system is heavily biased toward 9-5ers that are salary with flexibile hours... it's a bit unfair to those hourly people that work 10 hours half-an-hour away. Another addition to that bias are the constant mini-elections townships and school districts have. sometimes it feels like the whole thing is geared to those who have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about voting.... That would be why the senior vote is SO strong. I'd like to see the establishment of 4 election holidays throughout the year. it would be a 48 hour period maybe over one of those "monday" holidays that time off would be compulsory [note that you wouldn't be forced to prove you voted, just have the time made available to you]. I am a big believer in GOING to the polling place to vote. That's where you meet the other people that live around you... you should vote together there.
I got the shuttle early after it was released and Apple REALLY needs to step up the accessories. When I got my shuffle, I was, of course, keeping it in a coat pocket [it was winter] I suspect it got so badly beat up in the first month it simply didn't work. That said, after I RMA'd it, the plastic clam-shell protector came out and I haven't had a problem since... Right now the Apple Nano accessories aren't on shelves yet... you'd think they'd learn
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Duh! don't we have several games/movies about the subject of corperate interest in space real estate? If you can get there who can really stop you? To a certian extent the "law of the jungle" applies to the moon.. if you can get there to claim it... and KEEP it... it's pretty much yours...
Apple makes WAY higher profits per PC sold than Dell does.. Dell only hits 3-4% over their cost... they rely on upgrades for the profit. Apple makes up to 20% per PC after expenses... They can support A LOT of R&D on that extra.
But "expensive" is in the eye of the latest ads.. Apple doesn't really have a $299 striped down POS that will just barely work like Dell does. You are correct, by the time you bring that "cheaper" dell upto decent specs that apple sells standard. But "suits" go by the numbers and spring for the cheaper one every time. Dell counts on we IT people for profits because we "fix" their drastically under spec'd hardware and it's "our" fault those Dells aren't $299 like the ad says.
What the whole "UN internet" thing is really about is having some "world" body to police what people do on line... that SHOULD scare you because 4-out-of-5 seats at the UN are held by petty dictators.. and the "democracies" are lobbied heavily by corperations. This is ALL about France and Germany wanting to punish me in Michigan for publishing something about Nazis... or China getting tired of people inside hacking their way around the "great red firewall".
The internet only grew this much because of the US being so set on free speech for everybody.. as soon as you start adding rules and restrictions on what people can say [and that IS the purpose of international control] then you start a race to the bottom where the only content allowed is corperate sponsored and government approved!!
It's all about how you view the use of Ip addresses to start with. The "old guys" have this idea of everything with it's own IP address pie in the sky type thing. Unfortunately, they hoarded huge chunks of numbers up front making it very difficult for the rest of us to implement such grand schemes. The flip side is who wants every IP in your office to be routable? That's utterly stupid if all those PCs were windows. Nats and Firewalls in corperate/small home nework are the only thing holding back the virus/spyware/worm situation from being worse!! having set up corperate networks, it's a NICE thing to assign non-routable IPs to your office setup... it ensures your firewall can't be easily breached by something you forgot. Nat'ing is here to stay... we don't WANT people poking behind our firewalls... we don't want people to know about any internal IP other than the public address of our web page. Think of it like PBX in the phone world.. who want's their internal extention in the phone book for the world???
But with HDTV sets the broadcasters with antennas have all sorts of power now. It's too bad the local stations have never got on the TiVo thing because with HD they have all the cards... program guide + data stream, HD quality, up to 4 channels to air on.. With a very simple hack [think dual tuner myth-TV box] the stations could do this on their own right now... other than the obstruction problem, broadcast has the upper hand in quality and features right now.. if they would only start implememting them. They could simulcast 3 things at once so you never had to miss a "prime time show" and keep the advertizing money by showing the same commercials... or different ones per channel.. it just takes a little more work.
The affiliates desperately need to stick to the schedules better... I don't know how many good shows get canceled by poor scheduling rather than being a bad show. Case in point, firefly.. it jumpped around so much on my local channel I almost never got to see it... and it was a hard story to follow. Once it was on Sci-fi every friday, I got to see enough of it to really like it. Enterprise followed the same fate. they started showing it several times a week at different times of day... it was easy to catch on a lazy sunday afternoon if you were busy friday night. Then somebody got greedy and tried moving it's day and taking away the extra showings... I lost half a season because I wasn't glued to my TV on their schedule!
But Disney as a network has a lot of good content that fits the download model... Many of the disney network shows are plenty worth downloading a few at a time for the kids... it's the kind of stuff perfect for everyone to watch on road trips. The Disney network shows fit the "minivan" crowd of episodes on the go perfectly. Disney has just the kind of huge catalog of short stuff that's in demand, but too hard to market on DVDs.. [Think orginal mickey mouse, shorts, house of mouse, fantasia shorts, etc...]
The catch to "non-iTMS" stores is that they're pretty much ALL microsoft fronts!! Apple should really consider opening up something to Real... just to throw a bone out there to all the anti-apple people. Apple needs to start the enemy-of-my-enemy type thinking about the whole media thing... Bill Gates has an awsome gnack for getting along with "suits" at these big media companies. Apple needs to push the non-windows front a little harder. then the market will be big enough that one "store" can't dominate the landscape. Like in the brick-and-mortar world, the idea is to get enough different things out there it's stupid for anybody to try to sell their wares at only one store.
The difference is that Apple has one really big store... kinda like Walmart. How silly would it be if companies would refuse to sell their CDs at brick and mortar Walmart just because they were "bigger". Sure companies may favor Walmart over BestBuy or Barnes and Nobel, but record companies don't wholesale refuse to sell to any other chain like that. Microsoft on the other hand is trying to keep the market "selectively split" so that so the only thing you have to glue your stuff together is Microsoft DRM.. Microsoft is buy far worse because they're using their monopoly on the desktop to force all the publishers to be "sharecropping" paying a toll to Microsoft for everything you download.
I don't get the rabid anti-itunes rants.. there's no middle ground... choose Apple or Microsoft, everybody else is bit players.. remember, HD-DVD is the coupe-de-grace when MS will embed their DRM support in everything consumer!
This article doesn't cause REAL slashdotters any reason to fear... they sleep on their keyboards!!!!
But now we know the Flying Spagetti monster favored the Chineese first with the fruits of his noodly appendage.
The Poster was arguing that "real" auctioneers should have to take [and pass] "Ebay" classes if the Ebay people have to learn "talking really fast". Grandpa may have been an auctioneer for 50 years selling antiques, but that doesn't qualify him to ebay any more than your typical ebay-er to hawk fine art.
> It will also provide a new source of tax revenue, which is the main reason the gov't wants it. Close, but not quite.
But that's the real ticket.. if you have to be a "licensed" auctioneer, then you have to follow what ever rules the state puts on auctioneers... most states have sales tax, accounting, stolen property, etc. rules that you have to prove you follow... so yes, this is exactly about taxes!
but Spellforce is only a "B" game... so the mega stores don't want to stock it unless they can sell 500 copies like a "AAA" game.
If I were them, the plan's wouldn't be to release ANOTHER competing office suite, but to work within what's already out there. Once OpenDocument takes off, you'll be able to create tiny tools that work with the standard file format... something like a huge suite won't have to exist anymore... Look what Apple's been doing with Pages... It's a whole new way of using documents.. that makes it much easier for those who just want a pretty sheet of paper. When opendocument takes off, you'll be able to use all that wonderful Googlieness without a 100 meg program open to just type a grocery list.
That said, I really like the game, but without the expansions, updating to newer patches breaks stuff... It's a neat game though. It's also a lot like Once Upon A Knight [KnightShift for everybody else] It's closer to how my kids play warcraft 3 but the community [mods, maps, etc] is a bit hard to find much of unless you speak good German.
The "patriot" act was around for at least 4 years before 9-11 because the drug enforcement people got tired of not being able to use that wonderful CIA installed intel base. The CIA knows who's smuggling what around the bays.. and can use illegal, unconstitutional means to make sure they're not plotting attacks.. That of course means their agents have first hand knowladge of "where the boddies are burried" for many crime bosses... but they can't tell because the info was obtained illegally... "Patriot" was all about a giant grab for that information so more "normal" crimes could be enforced from the CIA's extreme measures to get intel.
The real bonus for Linux is to point this out to people. The Beta won't run in anything except 4-bit color on stock Dells... Vista will be a "line in the sand" so pretty much nobody will be able to upgrade easily... this is the fact to start pushing.. all those 800-1.5 machines that are perfectly good will be obsoleted just because of an OS change... but this Linux here will run out of the box.
The killer Linux enterprise app will be to build either an SMS style Ubuntu distro that can be fully remotely managed... or to build a Knoppix style distro that lets you customize for your companies lan... just boot the live CD and go!!! The big distros [Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake] all miss this.. the OS is not the issue, but configuration, management, updates, etc. of 500+ machines is the issue.. move email users faster, set up new stations faster.... that's where the REAL fight for MS is at.. most MCSE's don't even know how to do the parts of that windows can do NOW!!!
Bill G wants windows to be the $10 temp worker.. you just gotta pay him when you need one. Linux is like the $10+ benifits worker... you gotta put more effort into it, but it gives more back too!
That would be the software assurance that they sold everybody 4 years ago taht RAN OUT before you got any substantial OS savings? Microsoft tends to forget most people don't pay JUST for windows... normally they order Dells and that's just part of the cost. Trouble is we jut went thru a "silver age" of computing... 1GHz was 4 years ago? depending on the user's needs even that's overkill. MS is trying to use the Upgrade card but it's just not worth it. The only way SA was ever worth it was if you had to re-buy retail full licenses... they can make the record keeping a PITA, but it was about a 2/3-year split and if you were a company constantly cycleing thru dells every 3 years SA jsut wasn't worth it. In the Vista case, it's even LESS worth it than other windows versions because it DEFINATELY won't run on all the cheap Dells bought just this month!!! Signing for a whole company worth at this point isn't worth it.
But the suits love Billy G. he's microsoft's mealticket. As long as he can keep MS software as the ONLY way to bank, get govt docs, communicate with large corporations, and shut everybody else out, he'll have a steady sorce of income. MS could afford to GIVE the govt their products because if it's required to do business they can charge the middle men anything they want for it!!!
A lot of the problem with law enforcement is like that ocnversation in SW2 when Amidila is describing democracy and the constant throws of neigotion when Anakin steps in and says somebody "wise" should "make" the people get along... Much of our US law enforcement is of the same mentality. they're good people, but they aren't really taught to keep religion, morality, and law seperate in their minds... They tend to view law as religion... which causes trouble when you need to make changes!
It's about as perfect as you can get. It's simple for even elderly to understand. It's counted electronically to speed things up. The orginal copy with the marks are secured until the results are final. And the best of all, you still have paper copies should you need to hand recount.
The main thing I see need for in election reform is more consistancy, and more openness to alternate-shift workers. The current system is heavily biased toward 9-5ers that are salary with flexibile hours... it's a bit unfair to those hourly people that work 10 hours half-an-hour away. Another addition to that bias are the constant mini-elections townships and school districts have. sometimes it feels like the whole thing is geared to those who have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about voting.... That would be why the senior vote is SO strong. I'd like to see the establishment of 4 election holidays throughout the year. it would be a 48 hour period maybe over one of those "monday" holidays that time off would be compulsory [note that you wouldn't be forced to prove you voted, just have the time made available to you]. I am a big believer in GOING to the polling place to vote. That's where you meet the other people that live around you... you should vote together there.
I got the shuttle early after it was released and Apple REALLY needs to step up the accessories. When I got my shuffle, I was, of course, keeping it in a coat pocket [it was winter] I suspect it got so badly beat up in the first month it simply didn't work. That said, after I RMA'd it, the plastic clam-shell protector came out and I haven't had a problem since... Right now the Apple Nano accessories aren't on shelves yet... you'd think they'd learn