Well, when I worked at ZD a few years back it had just been bought by those Japanese dot.com geniuses - Softbank. They had bought it from someone else who had bought it from a Mr. Ziff and a Mr. Davis (might not be accurate on that but the story is similar enough..and this is all public info you can find).
Softbank slapped a lot of Softbank debt on ZD and then rolled out and IPO for ZD.NET from ZD. Then they decided magazines were not their core competency - despite providing practically all the content for ZD Net - and went on the market to sell ZD. And here we are today.
Basically, a Worldcom shuffle.
ZD magazines are good enough if you like that sort of thing, and on their own would probably be fine, but a lot of publishing is about financial games and the up front product does not necessarily represent the "business" of the company - definitely not in this case. The business of ZD is being a cog in some buyout firm's financial planning. I don't know how those things work, but it sure is not about making product.
Hell, I can't expect anyone being stupid enough to pay $750 million for ZD and EXPECTING to make money on it. They had to know what they were getting into, and they did it for a reason. Write-downs, etc.
The real news in this is not so much that MicroSoft did something bad, but that yet again another big American blue chip is caught playing with its stock price. It seems that stock manipulation is all that CEOs are good for these days. The 90s were so damn good to some people that it really went to their heads, and I think it will take a few years for it all to shake out. Its not just the MicroSofts and Enrons or the entire energy industry, but also the little players like Critical Path or XO Communications (2 stocks that I am sucker enough to own).
I look at the stock market these days like its a leper. I mean, should we trust the research analysts? the company execs? Jeez what crap. Maybe next year.
America had it so good for so long (the 90s was the longest ever economic expansion) that many fell victim to the age old weakness - hubris. Amazing how repetitive we humans are. Its all documented perfectly in any child's collection of greek myths.
Of course the sweet part is that if you are a CEO you just tell the SEC - "hey, sorry" - and you turn around and lay off 10% of your workforce to help cut costs and keep that stock looking good.
* Destruction of Aldaraan: Nagasaki, Hiroshima. Large Explosion to cause terror against innocent civilians.
I'll take the bait on this one. I've got nothing else to do at the moment.
The o-so slight difference between Alderaan and Hiroshima can be summed up in 3 characters - WW2. WW2 included Pearl Harbor, Midway, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, Singapore, China, etc. All these events - and many, many more - occurred BEFORE Hiroshima. There were Japanese offensives, American offensives, British offensives, etc. There were many nations locked in a war to gain control of a large space (the Pacific and Asia in general), which, incidentally, none of them owned by right of habitation. Neither the Japanese, the British nor the Americans had any real claim to the Pacific space other than the one claim which has always really mattered in the end - might is right.
So to plop down Alderaan and Hiroshima together as if they were the same kind of event removes Hiroshima from a very real historical context and reduces it the banality of a Hollywood script, the script in question being Star Wars. Star Wars is great stuff, but it doesn't hold a candle to real life and real history.
But I think to use the Alderaan/Hiroshima analogy to support your Empire/US argument I think you've got to show:
1) Alderaan and the Empire were at war openly. Just because some rebels come from Alderaan doesn't mean that it is at war with the Empire. 2) Alderaan's Pearl Harbor and Midway. Those were huge battles and even after Midway it wasn't clear the US was in a dominant position. When do Alderaan's forces challenge the Empire in open conflict? They don't. OK. Assume for a minute that the rebels are controlled by Alderaan (which is not true), then you still never see them do anything but run from Imperial forces. They only fight when cornered. That is not what the Japanese did. Very different. The Japanese were a full-fledged opponent, with a native technology industry and a prior record of victory in battle. Whether you think using the bomb was correct or not, you can't argue against the fact that it resulted from a full scale war. It was used to put an end to a conflict quickly, not to stop a conflict from growing out of control.
Frankly, I don't see the people of Alderaan having threatened the Empire quite the same way the Japanese threatened the US and England. So your comparison rings hollow.
But hell, I haven't seen episode 2(?) yet so maybe it will all become clear to me...
Throughout the 20th Century whenever a little Latin Country got uppity - and this fantastic letter by the Peruvian Congressman is definitely uppity - the US would send in the Marines or fund a dissident local general and presto, everyone was on board with the Plan again. Didn't always work (Cuba) but it worked most of the time (Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, etc).
Now I wonder, how long till the modern marines go in? and what form will they take? Microsoft donations to Peruvian schools? Microsoft donations to right thinking politicians in Peru to counter the bill? Time will tell.
Off topic - does the US government do the same as the bill suggests when it buys software for the military? It must, right? I mean, military men don't click thru EULAs everytime they get a new ICBM control system, do they? Does anyone know about this? It would be wonderful if the administrative side of the US government would imitate the Peruvian bill, but surely the military does. Or are all those military systems built "in-house", which I can't believe...
A lot of comments here center on performance and Sun hardware expense vs. Intel.
Can anyone with ACTUAL experience comment on performance differences on the "personal" sized computers? You can get a new SunBlade for a 2-3k with lots of memory (check out aceshardware.com for their experience), and we all know what you can get for 2-3k in the Intel world.
Assuming that the Intel computer has components listed as compatible by Sun (very important) has anyone ever compared Solaris 8 on the two architectures? Or Solaris 8 on Sparc vs. Linux on Intel (same price range, same tests). Of course 1,000 kinds of tests could be made, but any comparisons would be interesting. I mean, no really believes the fud about gigahertz.
Hopefully with all the strong opinions someone has actually done real comparisons...
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Well, when I worked at ZD a few years back it had just been bought by those Japanese dot.com geniuses - Softbank. They had bought it from someone else who had bought it from a Mr. Ziff and a Mr. Davis (might not be accurate on that but the story is similar enough..and this is all public info you can find).
Softbank slapped a lot of Softbank debt on ZD and then rolled out and IPO for ZD.NET from ZD. Then they decided magazines were not their core competency - despite providing practically all the content for ZD Net - and went on the market to sell ZD. And here we are today.
Basically, a Worldcom shuffle.
ZD magazines are good enough if you like that sort of thing, and on their own would probably be fine, but a lot of publishing is about financial games and the up front product does not necessarily represent the "business" of the company - definitely not in this case. The business of ZD is being a cog in some buyout firm's financial planning. I don't know how those things work, but it sure is not about making product.
Hell, I can't expect anyone being stupid enough to pay $750 million for ZD and EXPECTING to make money on it. They had to know what they were getting into, and they did it for a reason. Write-downs, etc.
The real news in this is not so much that MicroSoft did something bad, but that yet again another big American blue chip is caught playing with its stock price. It seems that stock manipulation is all that CEOs are good for these days. The 90s were so damn good to some people that it really went to their heads, and I think it will take a few years for it all to shake out. Its not just the MicroSofts and Enrons or the entire energy industry, but also the little players like Critical Path or XO Communications (2 stocks that I am sucker enough to own).
I look at the stock market these days like its a leper. I mean, should we trust the research analysts? the company execs? Jeez what crap. Maybe next year.
America had it so good for so long (the 90s was the longest ever economic expansion) that many fell victim to the age old weakness - hubris. Amazing how repetitive we humans are. Its all documented perfectly in any child's collection of greek myths.
Of course the sweet part is that if you are a CEO you just tell the SEC - "hey, sorry" - and you turn around and lay off 10% of your workforce to help cut costs and keep that stock looking good.
Man, can't be so bad being on top.
* Destruction of Aldaraan: Nagasaki, Hiroshima. Large Explosion to cause terror against innocent civilians.
I'll take the bait on this one. I've got nothing else to do at the moment.
The o-so slight difference between Alderaan and Hiroshima can be summed up in 3 characters - WW2. WW2 included Pearl Harbor, Midway, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, Singapore, China, etc. All these events - and many, many more - occurred BEFORE Hiroshima. There were Japanese offensives, American offensives, British offensives, etc. There were many nations locked in a war to gain control of a large space (the Pacific and Asia in general), which, incidentally, none of them owned by right of habitation. Neither the Japanese, the British nor the Americans had any real claim to the Pacific space other than the one claim which has always really mattered in the end - might is right.
So to plop down Alderaan and Hiroshima together as if they were the same kind of event removes Hiroshima from a very real historical context and reduces it the banality of a Hollywood script, the script in question being Star Wars. Star Wars is great stuff, but it doesn't hold a candle to real life and real history.
But I think to use the Alderaan/Hiroshima analogy to support your Empire/US argument I think you've got to show:
1) Alderaan and the Empire were at war openly. Just because some rebels come from Alderaan doesn't mean that it is at war with the Empire.
2) Alderaan's Pearl Harbor and Midway. Those were huge battles and even after Midway it wasn't clear the US was in a dominant position. When do Alderaan's forces challenge the Empire in open conflict? They don't. OK. Assume for a minute that the rebels are controlled by Alderaan (which is not true), then you still never see them do anything but run from Imperial forces. They only fight when cornered. That is not what the Japanese did. Very different. The Japanese were a full-fledged opponent, with a native technology industry and a prior record of victory in battle. Whether you think using the bomb was correct or not, you can't argue against the fact that it resulted from a full scale war. It was used to put an end to a conflict quickly, not to stop a conflict from growing out of control.
Frankly, I don't see the people of Alderaan having threatened the Empire quite the same way the Japanese threatened the US and England. So your comparison rings hollow.
But hell, I haven't seen episode 2(?) yet so maybe it will all become clear to me...
Throughout the 20th Century whenever a little Latin Country got uppity - and this fantastic letter by the Peruvian Congressman is definitely uppity - the US would send in the Marines or fund a dissident local general and presto, everyone was on board with the Plan again. Didn't always work (Cuba) but it worked most of the time (Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, etc).
Now I wonder, how long till the modern marines go in? and what form will they take? Microsoft donations to Peruvian schools? Microsoft donations to right thinking politicians in Peru to counter the bill? Time will tell.
Off topic - does the US government do the same as the bill suggests when it buys software for the military? It must, right? I mean, military men don't click thru EULAs everytime they get a new ICBM control system, do they? Does anyone know about this? It would be wonderful if the administrative side of the US government would imitate the Peruvian bill, but surely the military does. Or are all those military systems built "in-house", which I can't believe...
A lot of comments here center on performance and Sun hardware expense vs. Intel. Can anyone with ACTUAL experience comment on performance differences on the "personal" sized computers? You can get a new SunBlade for a 2-3k with lots of memory (check out aceshardware.com for their experience), and we all know what you can get for 2-3k in the Intel world. Assuming that the Intel computer has components listed as compatible by Sun (very important) has anyone ever compared Solaris 8 on the two architectures? Or Solaris 8 on Sparc vs. Linux on Intel (same price range, same tests). Of course 1,000 kinds of tests could be made, but any comparisons would be interesting. I mean, no really believes the fud about gigahertz. Hopefully with all the strong opinions someone has actually done real comparisons...