For the international law basis of the parent post, see the criteria of the Montevideo Convention. These are the international law standards for statehood. Recognition is not really a standard, but the recognition that a potential state has met those standards is, of course, important.
You're a bit mixed up. Corporations don't necessarily care about whether or not their effect on the market is good for the consumer. Capitalism (which concerns itself primarily with the market) does.
I did speak to the aunt and mother of the bride (who had commissioned me), but apparently they weren't willing to exercise any control over someone from the other side of the family. Stupid.
If he's that good, and he can charge for his service, he should invest in a photo printer. They run from $300-$3000 for home use. Not the end of the world.
One guy even wanted to tell us that our relatives wouldn't be allowed to take pictures at our own fucking wedding! I can't imagine how someone would hire this guy; what kind of asshole is actually going to tell their guests they can't take pictures?
Well, I'm not a professional photographer, but I have been the official wedding photographer twice now for family friends. My experience with "rival" photographers is uniformly negative. Since I myself am an amateur photographer, I don't really have any problem with random people taking their own pictures. But certain family members can really make your job impossible.
For instance, the first wedding I shot, the groom's step-mother came with a camera of her own, and acted as if she were the wedding photographer. Nevermind that the family had paid for me to shoot all the official photos of the wedding and celebration. She was constantly getting in my shots, getting in between me and bride during procession, etc. Infuriating. When taking group photos, I would give directions (stand closer, turn this way, etc), and she would start giving her own directions. Unbelievable.
If I were a professional photographer, I would certainly have a clause in my contract saying something very similar. If you hire me to be the photographer for the wedding, make sure that I am the photographer for the wedding. Having to deal with obnoxious relatives on a regular basis would be impossible.
The timeline that Jobs mentioned for the Intel chips hews pretty closely to the Pentium M. The dual-core Pentium M Yonah will support SSE3 by the time they're dropped into the new Macs, providing better parity with the G4's RISC and Altivec-based performance.
It remains to be seen whether Intel will make Mac a chip based on 64 bit architecture. It's doubtful that anything based on IA-64 will be thrown into the new Mac chips, but then again, since the likely Pentium-M derivative will be targeted toward the low-end machines, there won't really need to be 64-bit support. Apple and Intel will have to cross that bridge when they try to replace the G5s two years from now. That will be the real challenge.
I don't understand why Intel will need to make a chip perfectly compatible with normal x86 instructions. They have no backwards compatibility to worry about, and Apple has intellectual property rights to RISC and the Velocity Engine that they can donate to a new chip. We certainly may see Linux running on new Mac machines, but I wouldn't be so hasty in predicting dual-booting Windows/OS X machines, or easy hacks to get OS X to run on non-Mac-specific x86 chips.
As far as I know, the inheritance tax, as it existed pre-repeal, only taxed inheritances of over $200,000. I could be wrong, but that's how I remember it. While that ceiling certainly could stand to be raised, I think that repealing it outright was a bad idea.
I think it's a gross mischaracterization to say that Google is getting "clever people to be rounded up like cattle." Clever people work for Google because Google pays them decently, gives them 20% free time to work on their own projects, and has other work that's at least interesting and relevant. We can argue about whether rich web services are the next wave on the internet, but the point remains that clever people work there because they're intellectually excited, not because Google is the only game in town.
Google's innovation is applying its unique algorithms and way of looking at information as it relates to itself on the internet, and applying that to every other existing web function. The web functions themselves aren't revolutionary, but Google's take on the web was and still is. Sure, they're no Bell Labs from back in the day, but they are working from geniune innovation.
BTW, if you're looking for Google to help organize the files on your hard disk, you're asking for the wrong thing. They're working on making the organization of the files less relevant--case in point: Google Desktop Search. It will find your files for you, regardless of how they're organized. In this manner, they've made the traditional domain of the OS proper less relevant (what business does MS have sending that damn puppy looking for my files anyway?), and relegated the OS back to simply allocating your memory.
Google didn't just start out with scads of money and thousands of employees. They started out with two students, an algorithm, a couple servers, and a free webservice. That *is* a small company.
They've since grown into a mammoth company with huge server farms, thousands of employees, and the biggest valuation of any media company. That's my point: they went from extremely small nobodies, to bigger than the giant blue-chip corporate conglomerate, and they did so very quickly.
Someone will start a new corporation that will make it irrelevant. If we were discussing this back in the 40's or 50's, we'd all be railing against this Sears & Roebuck monopoly on mail-order catalog and department store industry. Today, Walmart has innovated to the point where Sears had to merge with KMart in order to survive. The same thing will happen to Walmart in a decade or two, and the same thing will happen to Google not long after.
I agree with this: unearned power, priveledge, and position are quite clearly antithetical to the spirit of free enterprise. This is one reason why I am staunchly against the Republican repeal of the inheritance tax. Stupid, stupid idea.
AT&T is a shell of its former self, Sears declined so far it had to merge with KMart, U.S. Steel was broken up, Standard Oil was broken up, Western Union is not even close to as influential as it once was.
The point is that competition killed a majority of these companies, and the rest are nowhere close to as preeminent in their industry as they once were. Fifty years from now, Microsoft will probably still exist in some form or another. It may have been broken up, divisions spun off, merged, or bought out--it doesn't really matter. All of those transformations are a sign of weakness in the face of rising competition from new and innovative companies.
I didn't say the Google doesn't buy other companies. They certainly do. But you don't see them trying to buy competing search companies in an effort to prevent competition. You see them buying companies whose products integrate well with Google's fundamental innovation (search).
I think your fear of brain-drain is a bit unfounded. Engineers go where they can be productive, and Google is innovating. Working on an alternative OS is an unproductive venture for nearly everyone except Microsoft and Apple. What Google is doing is innovating to the point where the OS becomes less and less relevant. Most companies don't die from direct competition (i.e. OS vs OS) but from asymmetric competition (i.e. OS vs cool thing that makes OS less relevant).
That's exactly right. Google is growing right now, and it's buying other companies so that it can amplify its fundamental innovation (search) using the small companies' innovative products (picasa, keyhole, etc).
It's not trying to buy startup competitors, which is what large declining un-innovative companies do when they're on the defensive. When google starts buying other competing search companies, we'll know they've jumped-the-shark.
You're absolutely right that in 10 to 20 years we'll be talking about the new company that can make Google irrelevant. Many people on Slashdot talk about Google being the Microsoft killer. At first, it sounds odd: how can an OS/Office Software company be killed by a web search company? But when you realize that Google's innovation has started a trend which could make rich client software companies less and less relevant, you begin to realize that direct competition is not what kills corporations, but asymmetric competition that makes them irrelevant. I give 100:1 odds that the Google-killer will not not be a search company.
The merger/spinoff phenomenon is a sign of decline, not health. Companies spinoff segments because they are unprofitable, unproductive, or otherwise detrimental to the efficient running of a company.
Sears and KMart were getting trounced by Walmart. Walmart was the hot new innovation because of its use of IT to coordinate extremely efficient inventory management. Sears and KMart were based on older business models, and in order to maintain their respective positions against the new competitor were forced to merge. The two may still be around under a different name, but the point remains that both were so shaken by a rapidly growing innovative startup that they had to sacrifice their unique historied corporate indentities in order to hang on. Unless they updated their business models too, the merger will only stave off their death, not prevent it.
You certainly can compare 100 years ago to today. There has been no fundamental revolution in the way business is done or organized--incremental changes to the rules don't comprise some sort of historical discontinuity.
I think you underestimate the level of power that was once directly wielded by corporations. All you need to do is read a book about the Robber Barron era and you'll see what they got away with. They rather openly bought and sold Senators, rather than the timid influencing with perks and donations that corporations are allowed today. They could (legally) raise private militias and use them against other U.S. citizens if they unionized or agitated.
Our government rightly broke them up. Microsoft doesn't nearly have the power that the old corporations once had. Not even close.
The successor corporations have all declined. As they grew weaker they had to enter into mergers, rebrand themselves, get bought, etc. in order to arrest their decline. New companies developing new technologies are continually undermining the foundations of the old companies, and will continue to do so, until private enterprise is outlawed.
The most amazing thing about this meteoric rise is what it says about a capitalist society. We hear a lot of moaning on Slashdot and elsewhere about how the Big Corporations are going to be around forever, and buy up every other corporation, and kill innovation. What people consistently fail to realize is that small companies are constantly rising up to destroy the old ones.
If you look at the list of the top 100 companies from 50 years ago, a majority no longer exist. If you look at the top 100 companies from 100 years ago, maybe, maybe 5 are still around. All the "big" corporations of today are supremely mortal. And their biggest vulnerabilities aren't to their main competitors, but to the small innovative start-ups, like Google.
Think about it: these two guys did some groundbreaking research, built something useful around it, and tailored the technology to their consumers needs. Now they are the highest valued media corporation, bigger than the goliath consolidated media giant AOLTimeWarner. Suing one's customers, buying Senators to write legislation for you, and being generally evil are not signs of impending oligopoly, but signs that the old dinosaur companies are going down the tubes, and will be devoured by a new wave of small companies.
Those benches may still be spot on. Marketing won't have to dramatically reverse their spin, because Apple won't be using Pentium 4's. They're much more likely to use some sort of souped-up Pentium M. Then they can still claim to be the latest and greatest.
A law saying that they have to notify the customer won't achieve anything. Companies must be made liable for the loss of personal data. If stealing someone's identity is a punishable computer crime, losing a vast database of 3.9 million identities absolutely must be a crime.
Perhaps if companies viewed massive personal data aggregation as a liability rather than an unlimited asset we would see much less collection/slae of personal data.
Slashdot Mirror
For the international law basis of the parent post, see the criteria of the Montevideo Convention. These are the international law standards for statehood. Recognition is not really a standard, but the recognition that a potential state has met those standards is, of course, important.
You're a bit mixed up. Corporations don't necessarily care about whether or not their effect on the market is good for the consumer. Capitalism (which concerns itself primarily with the market) does.
I did speak to the aunt and mother of the bride (who had commissioned me), but apparently they weren't willing to exercise any control over someone from the other side of the family. Stupid.
If he's that good, and he can charge for his service, he should invest in a photo printer. They run from $300-$3000 for home use. Not the end of the world.
Well, I'm not a professional photographer, but I have been the official wedding photographer twice now for family friends. My experience with "rival" photographers is uniformly negative. Since I myself am an amateur photographer, I don't really have any problem with random people taking their own pictures. But certain family members can really make your job impossible.
For instance, the first wedding I shot, the groom's step-mother came with a camera of her own, and acted as if she were the wedding photographer. Nevermind that the family had paid for me to shoot all the official photos of the wedding and celebration. She was constantly getting in my shots, getting in between me and bride during procession, etc. Infuriating. When taking group photos, I would give directions (stand closer, turn this way, etc), and she would start giving her own directions. Unbelievable.
If I were a professional photographer, I would certainly have a clause in my contract saying something very similar. If you hire me to be the photographer for the wedding, make sure that I am the photographer for the wedding. Having to deal with obnoxious relatives on a regular basis would be impossible.
Phil Schiller is Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. You know as well as I do never to trust what marketing promises.
Everyone seems to be assuming that the Intel chips will be more or less straight x86 chips. I think this is shortsighted at best.
First, Intel chips wont be replacing the G5's anytime soon. Benches of Tiger running on Pentium 4's with Rhapsody got destroyed by Tiger on a G5. Apple has indicated that the move to Intel will happen with the low-end Macs first: so eMacs, Mac Minis, and iBooks. The Intel chips will be low clock speed and run cool.
The timeline that Jobs mentioned for the Intel chips hews pretty closely to the Pentium M. The dual-core Pentium M Yonah will support SSE3 by the time they're dropped into the new Macs, providing better parity with the G4's RISC and Altivec-based performance.
It remains to be seen whether Intel will make Mac a chip based on 64 bit architecture. It's doubtful that anything based on IA-64 will be thrown into the new Mac chips, but then again, since the likely Pentium-M derivative will be targeted toward the low-end machines, there won't really need to be 64-bit support. Apple and Intel will have to cross that bridge when they try to replace the G5s two years from now. That will be the real challenge.
I don't understand why Intel will need to make a chip perfectly compatible with normal x86 instructions. They have no backwards compatibility to worry about, and Apple has intellectual property rights to RISC and the Velocity Engine that they can donate to a new chip. We certainly may see Linux running on new Mac machines, but I wouldn't be so hasty in predicting dual-booting Windows/OS X machines, or easy hacks to get OS X to run on non-Mac-specific x86 chips.
As far as I know, the inheritance tax, as it existed pre-repeal, only taxed inheritances of over $200,000. I could be wrong, but that's how I remember it. While that ceiling certainly could stand to be raised, I think that repealing it outright was a bad idea.
I think it's a gross mischaracterization to say that Google is getting "clever people to be rounded up like cattle." Clever people work for Google because Google pays them decently, gives them 20% free time to work on their own projects, and has other work that's at least interesting and relevant. We can argue about whether rich web services are the next wave on the internet, but the point remains that clever people work there because they're intellectually excited, not because Google is the only game in town.
Google's innovation is applying its unique algorithms and way of looking at information as it relates to itself on the internet, and applying that to every other existing web function. The web functions themselves aren't revolutionary, but Google's take on the web was and still is. Sure, they're no Bell Labs from back in the day, but they are working from geniune innovation.
BTW, if you're looking for Google to help organize the files on your hard disk, you're asking for the wrong thing. They're working on making the organization of the files less relevant--case in point: Google Desktop Search. It will find your files for you, regardless of how they're organized. In this manner, they've made the traditional domain of the OS proper less relevant (what business does MS have sending that damn puppy looking for my files anyway?), and relegated the OS back to simply allocating your memory.
Google didn't just start out with scads of money and thousands of employees. They started out with two students, an algorithm, a couple servers, and a free webservice. That *is* a small company.
They've since grown into a mammoth company with huge server farms, thousands of employees, and the biggest valuation of any media company. That's my point: they went from extremely small nobodies, to bigger than the giant blue-chip corporate conglomerate, and they did so very quickly.
Someone will start a new corporation that will make it irrelevant. If we were discussing this back in the 40's or 50's, we'd all be railing against this Sears & Roebuck monopoly on mail-order catalog and department store industry. Today, Walmart has innovated to the point where Sears had to merge with KMart in order to survive. The same thing will happen to Walmart in a decade or two, and the same thing will happen to Google not long after.
I agree with this: unearned power, priveledge, and position are quite clearly antithetical to the spirit of free enterprise. This is one reason why I am staunchly against the Republican repeal of the inheritance tax. Stupid, stupid idea.
AT&T is a shell of its former self, Sears declined so far it had to merge with KMart, U.S. Steel was broken up, Standard Oil was broken up, Western Union is not even close to as influential as it once was.
The point is that competition killed a majority of these companies, and the rest are nowhere close to as preeminent in their industry as they once were. Fifty years from now, Microsoft will probably still exist in some form or another. It may have been broken up, divisions spun off, merged, or bought out--it doesn't really matter. All of those transformations are a sign of weakness in the face of rising competition from new and innovative companies.
I didn't say the Google doesn't buy other companies. They certainly do. But you don't see them trying to buy competing search companies in an effort to prevent competition. You see them buying companies whose products integrate well with Google's fundamental innovation (search).
I think your fear of brain-drain is a bit unfounded. Engineers go where they can be productive, and Google is innovating. Working on an alternative OS is an unproductive venture for nearly everyone except Microsoft and Apple. What Google is doing is innovating to the point where the OS becomes less and less relevant. Most companies don't die from direct competition (i.e. OS vs OS) but from asymmetric competition (i.e. OS vs cool thing that makes OS less relevant).
That's exactly right. Google is growing right now, and it's buying other companies so that it can amplify its fundamental innovation (search) using the small companies' innovative products (picasa, keyhole, etc).
It's not trying to buy startup competitors, which is what large declining un-innovative companies do when they're on the defensive. When google starts buying other competing search companies, we'll know they've jumped-the-shark.
You're absolutely right that in 10 to 20 years we'll be talking about the new company that can make Google irrelevant. Many people on Slashdot talk about Google being the Microsoft killer. At first, it sounds odd: how can an OS/Office Software company be killed by a web search company? But when you realize that Google's innovation has started a trend which could make rich client software companies less and less relevant, you begin to realize that direct competition is not what kills corporations, but asymmetric competition that makes them irrelevant. I give 100:1 odds that the Google-killer will not not be a search company.
The merger/spinoff phenomenon is a sign of decline, not health. Companies spinoff segments because they are unprofitable, unproductive, or otherwise detrimental to the efficient running of a company.
Sears and KMart were getting trounced by Walmart. Walmart was the hot new innovation because of its use of IT to coordinate extremely efficient inventory management. Sears and KMart were based on older business models, and in order to maintain their respective positions against the new competitor were forced to merge. The two may still be around under a different name, but the point remains that both were so shaken by a rapidly growing innovative startup that they had to sacrifice their unique historied corporate indentities in order to hang on. Unless they updated their business models too, the merger will only stave off their death, not prevent it.
You certainly can compare 100 years ago to today. There has been no fundamental revolution in the way business is done or organized--incremental changes to the rules don't comprise some sort of historical discontinuity.
I think you underestimate the level of power that was once directly wielded by corporations. All you need to do is read a book about the Robber Barron era and you'll see what they got away with. They rather openly bought and sold Senators, rather than the timid influencing with perks and donations that corporations are allowed today. They could (legally) raise private militias and use them against other U.S. citizens if they unionized or agitated.
Our government rightly broke them up. Microsoft doesn't nearly have the power that the old corporations once had. Not even close.
The successor corporations have all declined. As they grew weaker they had to enter into mergers, rebrand themselves, get bought, etc. in order to arrest their decline. New companies developing new technologies are continually undermining the foundations of the old companies, and will continue to do so, until private enterprise is outlawed.
The most amazing thing about this meteoric rise is what it says about a capitalist society. We hear a lot of moaning on Slashdot and elsewhere about how the Big Corporations are going to be around forever, and buy up every other corporation, and kill innovation. What people consistently fail to realize is that small companies are constantly rising up to destroy the old ones.
If you look at the list of the top 100 companies from 50 years ago, a majority no longer exist. If you look at the top 100 companies from 100 years ago, maybe, maybe 5 are still around. All the "big" corporations of today are supremely mortal. And their biggest vulnerabilities aren't to their main competitors, but to the small innovative start-ups, like Google.
Think about it: these two guys did some groundbreaking research, built something useful around it, and tailored the technology to their consumers needs. Now they are the highest valued media corporation, bigger than the goliath consolidated media giant AOLTimeWarner. Suing one's customers, buying Senators to write legislation for you, and being generally evil are not signs of impending oligopoly, but signs that the old dinosaur companies are going down the tubes, and will be devoured by a new wave of small companies.
You can tell a GUI designer is going to be good when their "Laws of Interface Design" includes gems like this: "People are trained monkeys..."
Yeah, this one's going to be a winner.
This may be why CmdrTaco sent this story over from the "not-bloody-likely dept."
Those benches may still be spot on. Marketing won't have to dramatically reverse their spin, because Apple won't be using Pentium 4's. They're much more likely to use some sort of souped-up Pentium M. Then they can still claim to be the latest and greatest.
Nice troll, but keep in mind that Bush and his Republican Congress-critters have been pretty stalwart in keeping the internet tax free.
You're welcome.
It was already ROT26ed, what more could you possibly want?!?!
Perhaps if companies viewed massive personal data aggregation as a liability rather than an unlimited asset we would see much less collection/slae of personal data.
Well at least Duke Nukem's finally out over on this side...